Spam Wars:
Symantec Acquires Brightmail
There is no question that:
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We all hate Spam and
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It’s costing individuals and companies billions of dollars
a year in wasted productivity.
The question is what’s the best way to deal
with it?
There are lots of choices, ranging from
individual products loaded on individual PC’s (not a corporate
solution, of course), to corporate level products, to products that
are a part of an ISP services, to separate services.
And there are dozens of ways to thwart Spam,
from brute force approaches that simply eliminate any mail from
someone you don’t “know,” (likely someone you’ve registered
with your system) to sophisticated systems that read your hard drive
and figure out what you’d like to let through.
All of them exist in the hope (we’d guess)
that operating system vendors don’t pick Spam control as something
to integrate into their next generation products, possibly putting
them out of business.
But controlling Spam is a big business and
anyone who’s in the security software business needs a good Spam offering (or two) to round out their portfolio.
So you were probably not surprised to hear that Symantec has
acquired Brightmail, a leading anti-Spam provider who provides
services to over 1,800 enterprises globally also provides Spam protection for leading Internet service providers. Brightmail
protects approximately 300 million mailboxes worldwide.
Brightmail claims its multiple technologies
(which include proactive heuristic and reputation-based blocking)
block unwanted Spam while creating less than one false positive (a
blocked desired message) per one million messages.
Symantec and Brightmail already had multiple
relationships. Brightmail
uses Symantec’s antivirus technology and Symantec via a 2000
investment owns 11% of Brightmail.
The deal is expected to close in July.
Because of Symantec’s broad relationships in
the security software market, this deal could potentially change the
landscape in the Spam market, which is currently populated by a very
large number of relatively small players.
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