Excedent Deploys Abuse Prevention System to Ensure Customers' Email Reaches Recipients

Maintaining Network Integrity from Spam Abuse Keeps Customers off Blacklists

BLACKSBURG, Va. - (December 14, 2004) - Excedent Technologies, the proven provider of email hosting solutions for small businesses, today announced that the company has developed and deployed proprietary anti-abuse software to decrease the risk of compromising the integrity of its email hosting network. This anti-abuse software prevents potentially detrimental bulk email from leaving the email system, violating anti-Spam laws and exposing the email system to blacklists maintained throughout the world. Once blacklisted, businesses run the risk of outbound emails ending up in junk mail folders across the Internet.

"Preventing internal email system abuse is often an overlooked component of a successful email hosting system," said Patrick Mathews, chief executive officer at Excedent Technologies. "Preventing internal email abuse helps us to maintain the integrity of our network. With the amount of Spam being sent through email, maintaining high network integrity is as important and challenging as it has ever been. By deploying this kind of software, we ensure that our customers' email gets delivered to where it was intended to go. And, if for any reason a blacklisting were to occur, we are well prepared to quickly resolve the problem."

When a customer triggers an abuse alert, the offending mailing is immediately halted, and the customer is notified. Excedent then works with the customer to correct the situation.

As a secondary measure, Excedent performs a daily lookup of all mail server IP addresses in approximately 150 anti-Spam blacklists so that company engineers are aware of any blacklisting if and when it does occur. If one of its many mail servers where to be blacklisted, Excedent engineers contact the customer and quickly remedy the situation that caused the abuse. The company uses "fallback routing" to automatically redirect mail through alternate SMTP servers if delivery is not possible through the primary mail server cluster.

"We have built a very stringent abuse prevention system into our email hosting platform," explained Bill Boebel, chief technology officer at Excedent. "But as importantly, we have a proven contingency plan in place in case we are ever to become temporarily blacklisted. In this day and age, any company running a mail server, whether in-house or outsourced, runs the risk of being blacklisted no matter how careful they are. For this reason, having a proven, successful contingency plan in place is an absolute must."

More than 4,000 businesses use Excedent's managed email hosting services for secure and reliable email. The company provides email hosting solutions directly to small businesses and allows its private label reseller partners to attract and retain customers with email hosting focused on serving the small business community. The company works with service providers to deploy its hosted email system across various industry segments including automotive retailers, franchises, direct sellers, financial service companies and real estate agencies, among others.

Excedent's hosted email platform and Outlook-style webmail interface provides small businesses with a powerful alternative to enterprise email software packages, in addition to integrated security and anti-spam protection - all for a fraction of the cost of purchasing and managing the solution in-house. The email-hosting platform is housed in carrier-grade data centers, to ensure maximum uptime. Excedent also goes to great lengths to ensure its customers' privacy - promising not to sell customer data or advertise to them - key reasons for being awarded the TRUSTe privacy seal.

About Excedent Technologies
Excedent Technologies is the proven provider of email hosting solutions for small businesses. The company equips small businesses with enterprise class email hosting based on scalable, open-source software applications. Excedent delivers email hosting solutions through a growing channel of private-label reseller partners, as well as reaching small businesses directly through its Webmail.us subsidiary. Founded in 1999, Excedent is a privately held company serving more than 4,000 businesses worldwide.