Postini Announces 2004 Email Security Trends

Postini (www.postini.com), a provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that the 2004 spam war changed from a content filtering battle to a real time SMTP connection management battle.

"It's obvious by the amount of SMTP requests we blocked this year that security at the connection level is the best way for corporations to stop spam and virus threats," said Scott Petry, founder and senior vice president of products and engineering at Postini.

This year alone, Postini processed 95 billion SMTP requests and blocked over 40% of those requests based on the IP address of the sender before the threats could reach corporate firewalls.

In 2004 Postini also saw an increase in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprise's email directory to send out spam. Postini protected its customers from over 164 million DHAs and blocked over 38 billion invalid delivery attempts.

This past year saw the amount of legitimate email drop from 22% to just 12%, while viruses rose over the past year from roughly half a percent to one and a half percent according to Postini's Email Stat Track.

The virus infection average ratio during 2004 was 1 in 67, compared to 2003, when 1 in 200 messages were infected with a virus. Towards the end of the year viruses were infecting 1 in 25 emails.

Postini's rapid growth from 2,000 customers in December 2003 to 4,100 customers in December 2004 underscores both the increasing importance enterprises place on advanced email security and the effectiveness of Postini's solution in stopping spam, viruses and other threats.