Spam has become the bane of the average mail administrator’s existence. Business has become reliant on email as a communication tool and spammers are all too happy to take advantage of that fact. This unwanted deluge hawking everything from cheap drugs to hot stock tips has clogged mailboxes around the world. All this unwanted junk mail is a major annoyance, but the real business impact of spam is lost productivity.

Thinking about the real cost of spam, all one has to do is look at how an average employee is affected. Assume our hypothetical employee gets 100 messages a day, and that ~ 70% of that is spam. That is 70 messages a day.  The average user can sort out the junk in 2 minutes or so. That is 10 minutes a week and between 8 and 9 hours a year. In this scenario, spam costs our employee around one day a year worth of productivity. In large organizations, those costs can quickly add-up to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. And this is assuming that our employee does nothing but scans the subject and deletes the spam message. Spam often contains malware, which can make the productivity loss much greater. It only takes one person opening an infected message to completely disrupt a network.  Of course the flip-side of this is the false positive. Losing a legitimate email can be anywhere from a minor annoyance to a major disaster.  (more…)

IMail v10.02 was released yesterday.  It is available for download by logging into your myipswitch.com account or visiting the patches and upgrades page on imailserver.com.  For those of you running IMail Plus or IMail Premium, with an active service agreement, you will need to reactivate your license.  This process will update the license to reflect the new Commtouch engine and allow updates and scanning.

Earlier this week I had a discussion with Greg from the IMail Forums about integration of IMail’s web calendar with Outlook.  In the IMail v10 release we added the ability to sync your Outlook calendars with IMail’s web calendar, but what Greg is looking for is Windows Mobile support.  So here is a screenshot of a little something coming in IMail v11:

Thank for reading my blog and don’t forget to jump over to the IMail Forums  to participate in our polls and discussions.

Ipswitch Messaging Division today introduced IMail Server v10.02. With this release, Ipswitch has integrated Commtouch Anti-Spam technology into its product family. Commtouch Advanced Security Daemon (a.k.a. ctasd™) is a plug-and-play email-borne spam and malware outbreak detection daemon that combines your current core messaging network infrastructure with advanced detection and classification capabilities. The daemon adds a layer of email filtering to your mail delivery system in order to provide real-time classification, already in the first minutes after a new outbreak is launched. 

“With thousands of businesses globally relying on our mail servers for rapid, reliable email handling, we need to provide our customers the best email security technology and the best spam detection,” said Tripp Allen, president of Ipswitch Messaging Division. “Spam volumes have increased dramatically, so we sought to provide our customers with a high detection rate solution coupled with low level false positives. By selecting Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection™ technology we can provide them with significantly better spam detection. So overall, our customers will get better spam detection and reduced infrastructure costs, at the same price as our previous email filtering solution.”

The IMail Server product line consists of email servers providing the essential communication and collaboration tools for small and medium businesses, at a lower total cost of ownership than most enterprise-oriented solutions. The IMail Server Plus and Premium versions will offer spam blocking powered by Commtouch technology. Ipswitch markets its solutions in over 120 countries through a network of channel partners. 

“Spam and phishing email messages continue to barrage businesses worldwide. As a result, businesses need to implement a highly accurate email security solution that protects against all types of outbreaks, in every language and email format,” said Avner Amram, Commtouch’s executive vice president and general manager Americas. “We are pleased to work with Ipswitch in providing top-notch spam detection to Ipswitch customers.”

To learn more about IMail Server v10.02, please feel free to contact one of our helpful Account Managers at (877) 488-7341 and they can assist you with any questions you may have. 

The holidays are approaching and Ipswitch Messaging loves this time of year!  What better way to start the holiday season than with a Holiday Extreme Giveaway.  The contest is open to all persons or organizations that complete the purchase, installation and activation of IMail Server Plus or IMail Server Premium between November 7, 2008 and December 19, 2008.

Each week, Ipswitch Messaging will award one prize. Prize winners will be selected on the following dates: November 14, 21, 28 and December 5, 12, 19.  Prize winner will be selected by random drawing from all eligible participants for respective purchase/activation week. Prize winners will be made public on Monday morning of each week on the IMail Server Discussion List.

Giveaway Prizes include the following:

PSP Limited Edition with Madden 09
iPod touch — 8gb - 2^nd generation
Three (3) iPod nano’s — 8gb
iPod classic — 120gb

Ipswitch Messaging has implemented a new premium anti-spam engine from Commtouch. Commtouch Advanced Security Daemon (a.k.a. ctasd™) is a plug-and-play email-borne spam and malware outbreak detection daemon that combines your current core messaging network infrastructure with advanced detection and classification capabilities. The daemon adds a layer of e-mail filtering to your mail delivery system in order to provide real-time classification, already in the first minutes after a new outbreak is launched.  Commtouch is one of the most successful anti-spam solutions and best protection of investment for enterprises and vendors of messaging and security applications.

To learn more about the Ipswitch Messaging Holiday Extreme Giveaway, please visit us online at: www.IMailServer.com.

Also, feel free to contact one of our helpful account managers at 1-877-488-7341, and they can assist you with any questions you may have about your new purchase of the award winning IMail Server Premium and IMail Server Plus.

Ipswitch Messaging wishes you a safe and wonderful holiday season!

IMail v10.02 is close to being released into the wild. Many of you may have seen the blog last week announcing the addition of Commtouch (Click here if you missed it). We have been running v10.02 on our servers for a couple of weeks and the catch rates have been tremendous. Just to give you some stats on what I am seeing on my own personal account: 4,086 messages tagged as spam, 0 false positives and 1 false negative. I know based on past experiences that some of you are skeptical. I was in that same boat until I saw it in action. However, I think you will be pleased with the new Premium Anti-Spam system included in IMail Plus and IMail Premium. 

To get you prepared for the upcoming release, I am going to briefly mention a few of the features that will be coming in IMail Plus and IMail Premium.

Below is a screenshot of the Premium Anti-Spam settings for the domain. As you can see with the new version there are different classification levels such as confirmed, bulk, suspected, and unknown with the ability to set a different action for each classification.

Next up is a screenshot of the Premium Anti-Spam service settings, which now includes the number of days left in your Premium Anti-Spam subscription.

This next image is of the new IP ignore list, which I think is going to be very useful. The short description of the IP ignore list is that it will address the problem of having spam flood your server from servers/gateways in your whitelist. Instead of adding your gateway to the the Anti-Spam white-list, you will now add it to the IP ignore list. When the message is scanned those IPs will be ignored and the message will be viewed as if it had bypassed the gateway/remote server allowing for a higher catch rate.

A big thanks to all of you who have posted your feedback in the forum on what new features you would like to see. If you have not participated, click here.

If you are experiencing the web timeout issue in v10.01 and would like to install v10.02, please contact our Technical Support team.