Cloudmark Provides Spam Filtering for Openwave

Mobile software maker Openwave Systems will bundle Cloudmark’s spam filtering software with its email platform, the companies said Wednesday.

As concern rises in the wireless industry about forestalling the tide of spam, Openwave, with its worldwide roster of wireless as well as dial-up, DSL and service providers, is taking action to protect its customers with the Cloudmark partnership.

Asian markets are still the only ones to have encountered mobile spam on a large scale. But some experts in the U.S. fear a mobile spam epidemic here is inevitable.

“One of the things Openwave is trying to do with this partnership is take a leadership role in stopping spam at the gateway so their carriers can deliver spam-free service to their customers,” said Carl Jacob, CEO of Cloudmark.

“They [Openwave] are going to bundle Authority, our gateway product, with their Openwave email MX mail platform,” said Jacob.

Cloudmark filters about 180 million messages a day. Its filtering system is based on feedback from its 800,000 registered users.

“We take that data, which is too large to submit to enterprise clients, and distill it down using a process that extracts these indications of structural difference between spam messages and legitimate messages,” Jacob said. Updates are sent to Cloudmark’s enterprise clients every 30 to 60 days.

Up until now, Brightmail was Openwave’s sole email filtering provider, Jacob said. Brightmail will continue to provide email filtering for Openwave in the wake of this deal.

Openwave has hundreds of millions of mailboxes, Jacob noted. Their systems process about 1.3 billion messages a day. “Updating the software for those systems is an arduous task,” Jacob said.

Openwave Systems laid off 180 people, or 12 percent of its staff, in June 2003. But last month the company reported increasing revenues, $71.8 million, an increase from $68 million during the preceding quarter, and a decreasing net loss for its second quarter.