Excedent Releases Advanced SPAM Filtering System

Blacksburg, VA (July 5, 2002) - Excedent Technologies, a global leader in Web-based and wireless email hosting solutions, today announced the public release of its Advanced SPAM Filtering System. With this new filtering system, Excedent clients are now able to filter SPAM, also known as unsolicited, or junk email messages into a specified folder inside of their WebMail interface. This system will help businesses and consumers to fight the increasing amount of junk mail received from Spammers on a daily basis, saving them both time and money.

"Our customers, like a majority of email users, have grown irritated with the number of unsolicited emails they are receiving these days," commented Pat Matthews, CEO of Excedent. "Because email is such a vital part of business in today's world, SPAM is an issue every business must address."

SPAM has become such a problem throughout the Internet world that many researchers believe it could eventually hinder the benefits and efficiencies of using email as a communication tool. Over the last year and a half, the number of mass emailings has increased eight-fold, to more than 4.6 million per month, according to a statistical survey by Brightmail, Inc.

The Excedent Advanced SPAM Filtering System compares inbound emails against several SPAM databases, and performs various tests to validate the message format and the sender's DNS information. The message content is also scanned for common phrases that appear in junk email such as words like "FREE" or "Guaranteed!!!" Each test is assigned a weighting and is used in calculating whether or not to flag the email as SPAM. To avoid falsely identifying legitimate messages as SPAM, no single test will cause an email to be flagged. Complex and constantly evolving algorithms are used to combine all of the SPAM tests into a highly effective solution.

Our SPAM database tests flag email received from open relays, indirect open relays, dialup SPAM sources, insecure CGI forms, opt-in email lists that do not confirm subscriptions, SPAM software, and mail servers identified by "Spam Cop".

Our validation tests flag mail from mail servers that do not have a valid "postmaster" or "abuse" address, do not accept delivery status messages such as returned mail, do not have valid Whois information for their domain name, do not have correct MX, Address or Reverse DNS records, contain improperly formatted or fraudulent message headers, send improperly formatted or fraudulent SMTP commands, and that route their mail over abnormally indirect network paths (such as a US to US message traveling through a mail server in China).

"Constantly evolving our SPAM prevention technologies to stay atop of the latest Spam blocking techniques," commented Matthews, "accentuates our goal of providing customers with a reliable infrastructure to facilitate effective business communication."

About Excedent
Excedent is a global leader in Web-based and wireless email hosting solutions. Our mission is to provide companies around the world with a secure, reliable infrastructure to facilitate effective business communication. We work with small businesses and service providers of all sizes to deploy mission critical Web-based and wireless email systems. The company is privately held and has been serving clients since October 1999.