The following article appeared in TODAY, Manila - Philippines.

Australian Firm Helps Companies Fight SPAMMERS

An Australian software company and a Philippine information technology (IT) distributing company recently launched an antispamming solution equipped with features tailored for corporations, small businesses and individual users.

Ben Corby, the chief executive of Australian company New Millennium Solutions, said the TotalBlock software solution will be equipped with the Identify-Authorize technology to prevent spammers from entering a network. With such technology, Corby said the network can block spammed e-mails sent to the user because it has been tasked not to accept e-mails coming from sources that are not listed on the mailing list of the user.

"TotalBlock unclogs the network of unnecessary e-mail from reaching the organisation resulting in a reduction of data costs", Corby added.

This allows the IT administrator to focus on more pressing matters in managing the network, he said.

Corby said the entry of TotalBlock gives users a more practical solution fighting spams in the IT network. Corby stressed the difference of TotalBlock solution is that it uses the challenge-response approach wherein the sender is required to identify the content of the picture. Once the sender successfully identifies the picture, the sender is authorized to send e-mails to the recipient.

He said this is the major difference from the filtering and heuristic technologies that blocks spam in a more general manner.

Filtering refers to the controlling of access to a network by analyzing the incoming and outgoing packets and letting them pass or halting them based on the Internet protocol addresses of the source and the destination. Heuristics, meanwhile, looks for known sources, commonly-used text phrases, and transmission or content patterns that experience has shown to be associated with e-mail containing viruses.

"Heuristics first sees the spam before blocking it from entering the network. But spammers are very smart and can change quickly their identity once they have been pinpointed ", said Corby.

John Marvin Cruz, marketing manager of MISNet Inc., said the entry of TotalBlock in the Philippines is a welcome development since it enables companies to increase the efficiency of the networks and at the same time allows quick implementation because it is installed only on a server.

"TotalBlock also opens up the field because it can run on Windows and open source operating systems", he said.

MISNet president and chief executive Eric Natividad said the response of the market is positive as more than eight companies have expressed interest to test the product.

"In fact, one major company had already signed up for a purchase of the product for their antispamming requirement", he said.

MISNet is the exclusive distributor of TotalBlock in the Philippines.

Spam is defined as an unsolicited e-mail. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. Moreover, it also eats up a lot of network bandwidth.