Lyris MailShield blocks 10 millionth spam

• February 12, 1998

Lyris MailShield Blocks 10 Millionth Spam

World's Only Shipping Antispam/Antirelay Software Celebrates Milestone

Oakland, CA - 21 September 1998 - While governments wring their hands and technology companies promise relief "next quarter," Lyris Technologies Inc. estimates that its MailShield software has stopped over ten million pieces of spam (junk e-mail) since it started shipping in April.

The company bases its figures on the size of its user base, average traffic through customer sites and conservative third-party estimates of spam as a percentage of total Internet e-mail load.

According to calculations divised by spam-monitoring sources, Lyris MailShield has been directly responsible for total savings (in terms of reclaimed resources) of approximately a quarter million dollars.

Furthermore, MailShield's antirelay features have protected mail servers from being "hijacked" and passing on millions of additional pieces of junk mail.

While total figures are impressive, MailShield's utility is obvious even at the small business level. As Jeffrey Gomberg, COO of Synair Corporation said, "Since we installed MailShield a few months ago, the amount of junk mail we have to process has decreased significantly, from hundreds per week to near nil," he said. "And as the spam has decreased, so has the amount of time and money we need to waste to combat it."

Clay Luther of Selsius Systems Inc. agrees. "On average, it looks like about 10 to 20 percent of the e-mail sent to Selsius is spam or spam-like. That's about 300-600 messages a week, or 6-12 pieces of spam per employee. Last week, we rejected out of hand 90 percent of these messages for various known spam reasons, and I personally received only 1 message (out of 117 total messages delivered to me) that was spam and was not detected by MailShield. That's less than a 1 percent success rate for the spammer community, down from 100 percent pre-MailShield."

Lyris MailShield is an e-mail proxy server that runs on Windows 95/98/NT, Sun Solaris and IBM AIX. It can run on the same computer as the mail server (or a separate machine), and protects Internet mail servers on any operating system platform in a dual-machine setup.

About Lyris Technologies, Inc.

Lyris Technologies (http://www.lyris.com) is the developer of Lyris ListManager, the world's best-selling email marketing software. Over 4,000 businesses — from Fortune 500 corporations to fast-growing startups — rely on ListManager for high-performance email campaign management and analytics. Lyris also offers Lyris ListHosting for outsourced email campaigns, the Lyris MailShield software suite for spam protection, and Lyris MailEngine for fast, efficient email delivery. Founded in 1994, Lyris was recently named one of the fastest growing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.