IntY cans anti-spam claims from rivals
Security vendor says no solution can ever be 100 per cent effective
Security vendor intY has poured scorn on rival vendors that claim to have products capable of completely canning spam.
The firm told CRN that it is looking to recruit as many resellers in the UK as possible to push its new anti-spam managed service Maildefender to the SME market, but it has claimed spam can only be stopped if individual users have the ability to control their own levels of filtering.
Mark Herbert, managing director of intY, claimed Maildefender allows resellers to work with individual businesses to determine what constitutes spam and set up blocks accordingly.
The system quarantines suspect email remotely and sends a summarised list to the user each day, allowing them to retrieve any 'false positives' for up to 21 days.
"Definitions of spam vary depending on who is receiving it. There are pharmaceutical firms that want to receive emails about Viagra," Herbert said.
"There has been a rash of anti-spam solutions from large vendors that force users to comply, but a vendor should never claim to be 100 per cent effective against spam."
David Cole, managing director of intY partner DCT Solutions, said he is seeing "great demand" for the service. "The whole service is done at internet level, so it doesn't take up vital bandwidth. It allows firms to get on with everyday business without worrying about spam," he said.
However, independent IT consultant Mike Yates is more sceptical.
"Bandwidth cost is less of an issue, with many firms using broadband. But business users are no better able to predict the rapidly changing characteristics of spam in order to identify it than an automatic filter. This would waste time, which is one of the main damages the vendor is trying to limit," he said.