The company's chief executive, Sanjay Kumar, last night launched a new content filtering suite at Comdex in Las Vegas that includes spam filtering software. The new software uses weighted keyword filters and Realtime Block Lists (RBL's) -- independently maintained lists of IP addresses and domain names that are known sources of spam -- to filter and sort incoming e-mail messages.
CA is the latest in a string of vendors to dive into the lucrative anti-spam market. In January Network Associates snapped up SpamAssassin maintainers Deersoft, re-branding the detection and filtering engine as McAfee SpamKiller. Another anti-virus company to get into the spam game is Sophos, which in October acquired Canada based anti-spam company ActiveState.
Despite CA's latest offering not including more cutting-edge technology such as Bayesian filtering and pattern file matching, Chris Thomas, one of the company's senior security consultants, says the simple "weighted keyword" approach is surprisingly effective.
"The weighted keyword system worked better than we expected," he said.
Thomas said the company is looking at including some more sophisticated anti-spam features in the new package in the future.
Chy Chuawiwat, Asia Pacific managing director of Clearswift, makers of the MimeSweeper mail filtering software, says spam filtering is about using as many techniques as possible to achieve the desired outcome -- Bayesian filtering and pattern matching technologies aren't an anti-spam panacea, but they can make the job easier.
"We feel that the best way to protect the user is to give them all the technologies and let them come up with policies to use them," he told ZDNet Australia.
It was last week that Clearswift launched its new anti-spam solution.
Unsurprised by Computer Associates' debut in the anti-spam market, Chuawiwat says vendors are under pressure to offer a spam solution. "There's a big push for antivirus vendors, and even firewall vendors, to push out an anti spam solution," he said.
With strong investment in the area from venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before industry consolidation sees the larger vendors gobble up smaller, more dynamic outfits, Chuawiwat said during a phone interview from Taiwan.
"The market cannot hold the number of people in it. The market has to consolidate," he argued. "I think some of the bigger boys that can't develop [solutions] quickly enough will snap up the newer companies that are more creative and are able to respond more quickly."
It's only a matter of time before the vendors come up to par with specialist providers, Chuawiwat said, describing CA's newest offering as a "generational release". With any luck, the combination of heavy investment in new anti-spam innovation and the interest from large vendors will see spam go the way of viruses -- it will become a controllable problem, he added.
