A new version of its SpamKiller spam-fighting software for smaller businesses was unwrapped April 14 by McAfee Security.
It's the fruit of the company's January purchase of DeerSoft. SpamKiller for Microsoft Exchange Small Business - which includes the former DeerSoft SpamAssassin programming - uses a package of white lists, black lists, content filtering, heuristics, and other programming designed to determine whether a particular piece of e-mail is spam - by examining "a pattern of characteristics" in the message, ZDNet.com.
SpamKiller scans e-mail as they hit a business's computer network and has a so-called self-tuning feature, ZDNet said, "meaning it can do things like recognize familiar people with whom an e-mailer frequently corresponds and let their messages through, even if the e-mail contains characteristics that would otherwise flag them as spam."
"We see really that spam is a big growth area," McAfee growth marketing manager Zoe Lowther told ZDNet, echoing a view held by a number of computer security and antivirus software makers who are training closer efforts toward the spam wars. "We find that our customers have been asking for this."
McAfee's immediate plans include introducing three more SpamKiller variants before 2003 is over: SpamKiller for WebShield, SpamKiller for Lotus Domino, and SpamKiller for Exchange - the third targeting large business networks.
