SpamTitan ranked industry No.1 at blocking spam in Virus Bulletin’s January 2010 test

Boston, MA and Galway, Ireland – 11 January 2010: SpamTitan Technologies, the makers of powerful yet easy-to-manage spam and web filtering software, today announced that it has again outperformed the leading industry brands in the latest Virus Bulletin Spam awards. In comparative tests featuring 15 of its nearest rivals, SpamTitan combined the highest spam catch rate with a very low false positive ratio.  This result earned SpamTitan the much coveted Virus Bulletin Award along with strong independent endorsement for its highly effective and easy to use spam filtering solution. 

Virus Bulletin regularly conducts rigorous testing of anti-virus and anti-malware products to ensure the worldwide IT security industry stays equipped to protect users from the latest Internet threats.  SpamTitan, which runs as a virtual machine under VMware, was taking part in the Virus Bulletin test for only the second time.  In November 2009 SpamTitan picked up an award for the highest spam catch rate at the first attempt.  In January’s test SpamTitan again outperformed some of the industry’s best known brands including McAfee, MailMarshal, BitDefender, Fortinet and Symantec.

 “In recent years, e-mail spam has grown from a mere nuisance into a multi-million dollar business for criminals and the business consequences of not blocking spam effectively can be very damaging,” said Ronan Kavanagh CEO. “Unlike many of our rivals, SpamTitan does not require customers to choose between preventing large volumes of spam on the one hand and prescribing a low rate of false positives on the other - with SpamTitan they get both.”

Commenting on the result, Tony Lock, programme director at analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, observed, “Filtering incoming e-mail is about much more than removing nuisance messages or those that could compromise security. It is just as important to allow in all valuable messages and to keep as simple as possible the process of managing those messages that cannot be categorised ‘safe’ nor ‘threat’,” he added.

Two new categories of spam were added to the January test: those of ‘image spam’ and ‘large spam’. The former consisted of spam emails that contained at least one embedded image while the latter consisted of spam emails comprising a body size of at least 50,000 bytes. Both types of emails are notoriously difficult to filter, especially using traditional content scanning methods.
 
Martijn Grooten, author of the Virus Bulletin Anti-spam comparative review stated that:  ‘the detailed results show that neither large spam nor spam containing images are a problem for (SpamTitan) and, as there were few false positives it earns a Virus Bulletin Spam award with the second highest final score’.