Network Associates on Anti-Spam Shopping Spree

Fresh off its controversial buyout of McAfee.com, Santa Clara-based Network Associates has gobbled up anti-spam software firm Deersoft Inc. and announced plans for to go shopping for anti-spam and content filtering technologies.

Financial terms of the Deersoft acquisition were not released but Network Associates said the purchase included technologies associated with Deersoft’s consumer and enterprise anti-spam products.

Immediately, the plans are to incorporate Deersoft’s technology with the McAfee Spamkiller Enterprise product and deliver a desktop software for corporate clients. The integrated anti-spam software would be delivered at the gateway, email server and desktop for enterprise customers.

Later in 2003, McAfee’s enterprise policy manager — ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) — will be upgraded to manage SpamKiller Enterprise, Network Associates announced. With the coming upgrade, ePO will be tweaked to manage spam, McAfee and competitors’ anti-virus products as well as personal firewalls, gateway and email protection from a single tool.

In the second half of this year, Network Associates said it would integrate the Deersoft technology into the McAfee WebShield and GroupShield products to provide protection for Internet gateways and email servers.

Deersoft, out of Palo Alto, Calif., is best known for its SpamAssassin spam filters. SpamAssassin, an open-source product, later became SpamAssassin Pro for Microsoft Outlook. The company’s anti-spam products conducts more than 750 tests and heuristic scans to analyze messages and identify spam.

“[This] acquisition of Deersoft is the first in a series of investments McAfee is making into anti-spam and content filtering technology…We have acquired extensions to the leading open source ‘black list’ application and we will add applications that detect spammers even before they appear on black lists, supplementing that with the ability for customers to filter internal content with very tight control,” said Mcafee President Art Matin.

Networks Associates competes with the likes of Check Point Software, Computer Associates and Symantec. It vends network security software in three product groups: McAfee Security, Sniffer Technologies and Magic Solutions.