Tumbleweed Unveils Anti-Spam Service

Messaging security vendor Tumbleweed Communication announced an anti-spam service that builds on the capabilities of the company’s Secure Mail 5.5 software.

Tumbleweed Dynamic Anti-Spam Services utilizes a spam analysis engine that receives dynamic updates published by the Tumbleweed Message Protection Lab.

This lowers the cost of administration and management by automating the manual steps required to tailor the Secure Mail policy engine to each customer’s specific concerns and mail management rules, company officials said.

“Companies were spending IT resources on the care and feeding of spam tracking and spam identification methods, so they asked us to help them automate some of that,” said Dan Maier, senior product marketing manager with Tumbleweed.

Interest in anti-spam products is being fueled by concerns about liability for pornography or hate mail originating within a company, and the negative impact on productivity from workers missing business-critical messages as they wade through spam.

The Secure Mail required base product is sold on a server-based pricing model averaging between $80,000 and $160,000. The product runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 and SQL Server database platforms. The Anti-Spam Service will be priced on an annual subscription basis based on the number of servers.

Features of the new Dynamic Anti-Spam Service include: a spam analysis engine that applies heuristic and statistical analysis that is extensible over time to email traffic, in order to identify spam; an Internet-based update service that publishes new heuristics to the analysis engine up to several times per day; and the Tumbleweed Message Protection Lab, a research facility established to analyze spam and study messaging security and protection.

The lab will also be used to develop vertical industry-focused security applications, such as for financial services and health care firms that need to comply with specific government regulations.