XO Communications, a leading provider of national and local telecommunications services, announced the availability of Perimeter Email Protection (PEP), its new email security and email disaster recovery service. The new service expands the existing XO email and hosting service delivery platform to provide businesses with increased email security and optimal mail server performance, and helps combat increasing costs associated with junk email, denial of service attacks and viruses spreading on the Internet.

According to a survey released last year by the University of Maryland, the cost of spam in terms of lost productivity has reached more than $21 billion annually. XO Perimeter Email Protection helps businesses address these costs by providing a complete suite of email security capabilities to help protect email systems at the edge of the network. The service provides the following features:

    * User Validation: Validates incoming email against legitimate e-mail
      users provided by the business and rejects unwanted email before it
      arrives at the customer's server, resulting in better mail server
      performance.
    * Email Protection: Provides on-premise mail servers with a robust level
      of protection against e-mail based denial of service and dictionary
      attacks as well as spam.
    * Email Disaster Recovery: Reduces loss of all incoming email if the mail
      server goes down and delivers email when the server is restored.
    * Reporting: Provides daily reports on how a business' email server is
      being protected.

"Email is the lifeblood of business communications and all too often it is brought to a halt by something that can be easily prevented," said Barbara Branaman, vice president and general manager of XO's hosting business unit. "Our Perimeter Email Protection service leverages our patented clustered hosting technology and email platform to provide a robust email security service that prevents unwanted email and attacks at the boundary of a customer's network."

The new XO Perimeter Email Protection service is being offered to new customers and existing customers using XO and Concentric Hosting services, XO Dedicated Internet Access and bundled services from XO. PEP is very cost effective and can be enabled online by existing customers through their XO Web Hosting account management portal. With PEP, XO continues to add value to services offered to customers by including this level of service for free with their existing hosting and email accounts. If a customer's hosting and email account does not have enough resources, the customer can upgrade to a larger account and receive more user allocations as part of the account or pay an additional fee per each user over the standard account allocation.

For more information about XO Perimeter Email Protection, go to http://www.xo.com/products/smallgrowing/internet/dia/webbasics.html or call 1-877-932-2629.

Concentric (www.concentric.com), an XO Communications service, offers business-grade web hosting solutions that cost-effectively scale to meet the needs of today's growing businesses. As the holder of a patent for its Clustered Hosting architecture, Concentric has designed a unique platform that delivers superior performance, reliability and security. Backed by an industry leading 99.9% SLA, a 3-Month Satisfaction Guarantee along with 24x7 customer care, Concentric offers web site hosting, email, ecommerce, sophisticated junk mail filtering, web builder tools, and online marketing services designed to help companies effectively leverage the power of the Internet.

XO Communications (www.xo.com), a subsidiary of XO Holdings, Inc., is a leading provider of national and local telecommunications services to businesses, large enterprises and communications service providers. XO offers a complete portfolio of services, including local and long distance voice, dedicated Internet access, private networking, data transport, and Web hosting services as well as bundled voice and Internet solutions. XO provides these services over an advanced, nationwide facilities-based IP network and serves 75 metropolitan markets across the United States.