CAMBRIDGE, MA - 24 Jun 2002: In an effort to protect customers against the increasing amount of unsolicited and undesirable email ("spam"), IBM Lotus software has announced that IBM Lotus Domino 6 will include anti-spam features that would help reduce the amount of unwanted messages routed to user's in-boxes.
META Group estimates the percentage of overall inbound Internet corporate e-mail classified as spam is between 2% and 10%, with that number expected to grow to 10%-20% during the next five years. Medium companies are routinely getting 20,000 spam messages per day.(1) Experts also estimate that an employee that receives only 5 spam messages per day and spends 30 seconds dealing with each message will waste 15 hours a year managing their in-box.(2) In addition to wasting time and inhibiting productivity, spam e-mail wastes immeasurable IT resources by clogging e-mail servers and LANs and overloading mailboxes, which consume valuable bandwidth and negatively affecting network performance. In today's competitive market, corporations cannot risk anything that will hinder employee collaboration.
While competing software products leave spam management to the end user, Lotus Software's new anti-spam technology is located on the server, which is intended to lower administration and maintenance costs by giving IT administrators more control over emails that get distributed to employees. Lotus Software has always strived to provide users with tools to help manage their email systems, and the new features in Domino 6 would help IT administrators weed out spam before it reaches end-users, allowing both IT administrators and employees to avoid inconvenience.
Some of the new features include:
- Increased support for administrators to control incoming messages from certain mailing/distribution lists.
- Added support for checking public "blackhole" lists. If the IP address of a connecting host is on the list, the administrator can decide how to treat incoming messages from that host.
- Added "system mail rules" allowing administrators to filter all mail messages based on content and then either reject, not-deliver, stop or route unwanted messages to a database. For example, messages can be intercepted based on the message subject line, or an attachment name that is indicative of a virus, all before anti-virus software vendors have updated the scanning
profile.
- Enhanced abilities to look-up inbound recipient addresses in the Lotus Domino directory, preventing messages from being further routed into a corporate infrastructure, thereby reducing the amount of spam being routed through a company.
"The average e-mail user receives approximately 1,500 pieces of spam yearly and our commitment is to block the majority of unwanted e-mails from harrowed users' inboxes," stated Ken Bisconti, Vice President, Messaging Solutions, Lotus Software, IBM. "Advanced spam control and filtration functionality in IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 6 are just one more way to satisfy our user-base by helping them manage their in-box, enabling quicker response and increased productivity."
Lotus Notes and Domino 6 are now available for download testing from www.lotus.com/ldd and will be generally available in Q3 of this year. Final pricing will be announced upon availability.
Contact(s) information
Michael Shamrell
IBM Media Relations
(617) 693-1264
michael_shamrell@us.ibm.com
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| Software Information Management (DB2), Workplace, Portal & Collaboration Software (Lotus), Tivoli, Rational, WebSphere, Open standards, open source |