2008-08-25 13:53:02 - Spam e-mails cost European businesses EUR 50 billion a year in lost profits and a lot of irritation, and represent a security risk. A new spam filter is now removing the largest number of spam e-mails to date and has been voted the best in the world.

At the annual CEAS Conference in San Francisco on 21 - 22 August, which is the world's largest e-mail security conference and is attended by developers and leading researchers from MIT and Cambridge, Solido Systems won the competition for the world's best spam filter by removing 99.9% of all spam e-mails.

'Spam is a major problem and costs European businesses more

than EUR 50 billion a year in lost profits. Spam is also a major source of irritation amongst employees and IT specialists and represents a security risk when viruses and trojan horses are sent as e-mails to millions of recipients', says director and founder Christer Hasse from Solido Systems.

Existing spam filters have not been enough:

'With existing spam filters, 66% of e-mails that are received by the end user are considered to be spam by the users and result in a substantial loss of efficiency. So there is a real need for new solutions.' Source: Nucleus Research, 'The Repeat Offender', April 2008

Christer Hasse founded Solido Systems five years ago because the customers of his hosting company, Armada Hosting, were already being plagued by excessive amounts of spam which the solutions available on the market at the time could not get rid of.

The Solido System Spam Filter can be downloaded free of charge for 30 days from www.solidosystems.com/products/spamfilter/

About the Solido Systems Spam Filter (quotes from Christer Hasse, director and founder)

'We see our very close collaboration with our sister company Armada Hosting as a distinct force. This, combined with our flexible design in terms of both organisation and software, gives our developers a finger on the pulse and the ability to monitor developments in the spam threat picture very closely, something which our major competitors perhaps find difficult to match'.

'In order to achieve this flexibility, since the beginning we have worked actively to minimise internal bureaucracy in order to minimise the delay between the planning of technical improvements and our customers benefiting from them.'

'Despite our size, we believe in our ability to find better and more creative solutions than our competitors'. It is precisely the not overly distributed development of the filter that raises the level of knowledge of the individual developer concerning the links between the various components of our software'.

About the CEAS Conference and the competition

CEAS is the conference at which industry discusses e-mail security with the academic world. The conference takes place in Silicon Valley on 21 and 22 August at Microsoft and is the largest of its kind. CEAS was established by Microsoft and IBM and every year attracts leading security providers and researchers from MIT and Cambridge.

The CEAS competition took place during the period 5-8 August over 72 hours and the spam filters were exposed to 110,579 spam e-mails and 27,125 harmless e-mails, known as ‘ham e-mails'. During the test, Solido Systems eliminated 99.9% of the spam e-mails. The judges on the anti-spam panel consist of a group of volunteers from universities and security experts from IBM and Microsoft. They assess the effectiveness of the spam filters based on the number of spam e-mails that the filters are able to eliminate relative to the number of ordinary e-mails that the filter snaps up.

Links

Technical description of the Solido Systems Spam Filter:
zimbra1.armadahosting.com/home/ch/Public/spamfilter_tech.pdf

Solido Systems: www.solidosystems.com/
The CEAS Conference: www.ceas.cc/

CEO, Christer Hasse full figure:
www.photopop.dk/client/Christer_1A.jpg.zip

CEO, Christer Hasse, half figure:
www.photopop.dk/client/Christer_1B.jpg.zip

Try the Solido Systems Spam Filter free for 30 days: solidosystems.com/download/