SendMail, Cloudmark team against spam

SendMail, whose technology shuttles nearly 60 percent of e-mail on the Internet, has agreed to make Cloudmark's antispam filtering tools a centerpiece of its commercial mail management software. SendMail produces open-source software that routes corporate e-mail to and from the Internet; 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies use the software on their networks. It also sells a commercial version that includes e-mail management and filtering services to protect enterprises against viruses and spam. By partnering with Cloudmark, SendMail replaces its former antispam provider Elron Software, and it stakes its sales on the effectiveness of Cloudmark to fend off unwanted e-mail.

"Antispam is a very critical piece of mail management and mail filtering," SendMail CEO and President Dave Anderson said. "Cloudmark is now the core of what we sell (in antispam). And we sell one consolidated package (for e-mail management) so that all of the e-mail quaranteed can be processed from one centralized location." Anderson said that the company could see revenue increase 50 percent in the next year as a result of the Cloudmark deal.

For Cloudmark, the deal gives the company new stature in an industry rife with competition. Sendmail chose Cloudmark after testing 42 antispam software products over several months, Anderson said. Cloudmark's product Authority won for its performance and effectiveness at mitigating false-positives, or mislabeling legitimate e-mail as spam, Anderson said. "This deal is important because there's so much Sendmail out there, that anything associated with it is bound to get some scrutiny from commercial Sendmail shops," said Matt Cain, research analyst at Meta Group, based in Stamford, Conn. "From Cloudmark's perspective, it raises their visibility, and gives them new distribution."

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