Verio Bolsters Spam Protection Capabilities for Shared Hosting Customers Through Powerful Email Defense Solution Offering

Verio, a subsidiary of NTT Communications and a leader in global IP solutions, today announced the availability of the Verio Email Defense Solution, a service that provides comprehensive messaging protection against spam and other email threats for shared hosting customers. To address the needs of small to medium sized businesses, Verio will add this solution to the entire shared hosting product set, thereby continuing to offer products and services that help customers grow their online businesses.

Partnering with MX Logic Inc., a leading provider of email defense software that ensures email protection and security for service providers, the Verio Email Defense Solution provides enhanced customer security with reliable and comprehensive messaging protection, while significantly reducing spam-related network, server and storage costs. Designed for a distributed architecture with carrier-grade reliability, the flexible software platform enables Verio to deploy the Email Defense Gateway, and then customize its solution by adding filtering modules as needed.

With the Email Defense Solution, Verio can help to ensure that spam, unwanted content and attachments are blocked, and minimize any viruses, worms and other email threats such as fraud and phishing scams. The solution also features comprehensive spam filtering and around-the-clock messaging infrastructure attack protection, blocking vulnerabilities at the perimeter before entering the network.

"Verio's Email Defense Solution cut our spam by a solid 80 percent, giving us a huge improvement in staff productivity," said Francis McInerney, managing director of North River Ventures LLC, a Verio customer. "Verio's Email Defense clearly identifies spam, making it easy to control and eliminating huge headaches for all our people. Most importantly, fewer headaches for us mean fewer headaches for our clients."

Verio has included Whitelist and Blacklist capabilities to provide customers with additional controls to effectively manage the flow of email into their accounts. Whitelist capabilities allow customers to create and manage a list of email addresses and domains that will not be filtered, while the Blacklist function enables a customer to create and manage a list of addresses and domains that will be denied and not delivered.

"Spam is no longer just an electronic nuisance that companies can simply ignore. It has become a costly and dangerous technology issue for companies of all sizes, threatening the security of their networks, as well as employee productivity," said Gwenael Hagan, vice president of product strategy for Verio. "We're helping our customers address these threats by offering a comprehensive solution to guard against spam and the viruses that often accompany it. By offering such enhanced products and leading technologies, we allow our customers to do what they do best - focus on their core business, while we provide solutions that enhance productivity and protect infrastructure, in one complete package."

According to a recent study conducted by IDC, The True Cost of SPAM and Value of Anti-SPAM Solutions, the surge in spam poses a growing threat to productivity. IDC estimates that spam represented 32 percent of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, essentially doubling from 2001. The Verio Email Defense Solution offers customers peace of mind through message content (Bayesian) filtering, based on message contents rather than sender or subject matter line filters. Bayesian filtering has proven successful at removing 98 percent of spam - and it has a near zero false positive rate.

Some of the key benefits of the Verio Email Defense Solution include:

-- Controlled Blacklists of known SPAM sources

-- Controlled network level filtering, including email attack protection.

-- Message Content (Bayesian) Filtering

-- Policy-based messaging threat management, allowing all email protection and security to be managed through one centralized policy configuration and reporting platform.

-- Customer control to enable/disable inbound filtering and set delivery options.

-- Whitelist and Blacklist capability to provide customers additional controls to manage the flow of email into their accounts.

Verio is offering the solution as part of its standard offering to new shared-hosting customers and its existing US-shared hosting customer base. Verio will also add enhanced features and functionality, including anti-virus protection, to its email defense solution.

About Verio

Verio Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications (NTT Com), which provides long distance and international telecommunications reaching over 200 countries worldwide. Verio is the world's largest operator of Web sites for businesses and a leading provider of global IP solutions. NTT Com and Verio market their global IP solutions under the NTT/VERIO brand. The company offers businesses a broad range of Internet services, including Web hosting, dedicated access, virtual private networks, and managed service offerings, among other enhanced services. Verio supports its operations with highly reliable and scalable global infrastructure and systems including the NTT/VERIO Global IP Network, and provides Web hosting services to customers in more than 170 countries. The combination of Verio and NTT Com offers services to meet the growing and diverse needs of all businesses, including small to medium businesses, large global enterprises and multi-national corporations. More information can be found at www.verio.com and www.ntt.com/index-e.html.

About MX Logic

MX Logic, Inc. provides innovative email defense solutions that ensure email protection and security for enterprises, service providers, government organizations, and resellers and their customers. Deployed as a managed service or on-premise software, the company's feature-rich solution suite is the industry's most comprehensive, flexible and easy to use. Founded by messaging industry pioneers, MX Logic has delivered numerous industry firsts to the enterprise spam market, including becoming the first managed service provider to: leverage Bayesian Statistical Classification; provide spam beacon ("Web bug") blocking; offer quarantine management via email; provide corporate-level quarantine release reports that help reduce inappropriate email while decreasing corporate liability; and deliver a solution for tracking URL click-throughs from email to the Web, providing increased corporate control and security. Through the company's managed service offering, MX Logic processes millions of messages per day for over 2,000 organizations, including EnCana, Hyundai Motor America, The Sports Authority, YMCA and ServiceMaster. In addition, MX Logic is the only email defense company to offer both a managed service and a turnkey, carrier-grade software solution for service providers. For more information, visit www.mxlogic.com.

Verio and the Verio logo are trademarks and/or service marks of Verio Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered marks of their respective owners. (C)2004 Verio Inc. All rights reserved.