Press Release

Complete Email Security for Enterprises Now Available: ActiveState's PerlMx Captures Over 98% of Spam

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 13, 2002-- ActiveState, the leader in open languages, today announced the 2.0 release of PerlMx, the most effective email filtering system available. PerlMx blocks more than 98% of unsolicited email at the gateway, securing the network by filtering mail before it reaches the desktop. PerlMx supports the most widely used mail transfer agent, sendmail.

PerlMx provides enterprises with a complete email security solution by identifying and quarantining spam, protecting against viruses, enforcing corporate communications compliance policies, and allowing mail administrators to automatically compile usage statistics. The powerful content security features protect enterprises against productivity losses, network downtime, and vulnerability of informational assets.

Spam is widely recognized as a growing problem. Internet research company Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that by 2006 junk emails will more than double, with the average user receiving 1,400 spam emails, totaling over 206 billion in the US alone. Present attempts to address this, either through self-regulation by the direct marketing industry, or through identification of known spammers, have been ineffective. An ActiveState study found that only 2% of UCE (unsolicited commercial email) is guideline compliant, and that only 31% of spam is identified by the most common anti-spam method, realtime blackhole lists (RBL).

"PerlMx has been phenomenal in catching close to 100% of the spam we receive and that's with more than 15,000 emails going through our network every day. The response from our users has been incredibly positive," said Rob Henderson, Associate Facilities Director, Computer Science Department, Indiana University. "It was also a breeze to install, taking me only an hour to deploy."

PerlMx's standard filters are pre-built to readily address email content security and management. These include:

• SpamCheck - identifies and quarantines unsolicited email, using a set of weighted tests to determine the overall probability of spam during the delivery process.
• VirusCheck - checks executable content or file names in email for known viruses and will reject, redirect, clean, log, quarantine or annotate the message.
• PolicyCheck: provides keyword checking, mail auditing, mail archiving, mail conversion, and mail banners.
• AdminCheck - gathers statistics about email processed such as source IP address, sender, recipient, body size, and more.

"The growing flood of spam is a significant productivity issue for enterprises, who are increasingly using email as a critical communications tool," said Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState. "Our anti-spam filter utilizes several analytical techniques to reach the high 98% spam block rate, which we are constantly adapting and updating as spammers become more sophisticated."

"Perhaps the single biggest thrust of PerlMx 2.0 has been to make it trivially easy to install, configure and run the product, to the point where knowledge of Perl is not a prerequisite," said Gurusamy Sarathy, PerlMx Tech Lead. "Various standard filters are available to address most common email content management needs, including spam and virus protection. And when it comes to extending or customizing it to fit unique needs, email content managers have at their disposal the world's most powerful text processing language, Perl."

PerlMx is priced per CPU. For additional details please go to www.ActiveState.com/PerlMx/release.

About ActiveState:

ActiveState is the leader in open language products and services. ActiveState's key technologies are Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP, and XSLT. Our offerings provide assurance and productivity for open languages and server side email management.

     ActiveState
     Lori Pike, 604/808-6655
     Email: LoriP@ActiveState.com