ActiveState Creates Anti-Spam Task Force

VANCOUVER - Mar 31/03 - SNS -- ActiveState(TM) Corp. has created a team to develop a long term technical solution to the problem of quickly identifying new forms of spam email.

The Task Force members include: Dr. John Graham Cumming, creator of the popular open source Perl-based Bayesian mail filtering program, POPfile; Tim Peters, creator of SpamBayes, a Python-based open source Bayesian email classifier; Jason Rennie of MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab and creator of the open source tool iFile, an automated email classification system; and Gary Robinson, a leading mathematician on collaborative filtering. The Task Force is focusing on anti-spam issues affecting the enterprise, and is led by ActiveState's Director of Development, Jesse Dougherty.

Industry analysts Ferris Research estimates that spam will cost corporate America over $10 billion in lost productivity in 2003 alone. The annual cost is expected to double as the amount of spam to U.S. businesses increases from approximately 25% of all email today, to nearly 50% in 2008.

Spammers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated in their techniques, adopting new methods to foil spam-blocking software. The adaptive filtering approach of the Task Force has the predictive capability to identify these methods and their first technical developments will be seen by ActiveState's PureMessage(TM) customers as early as April in the regular spam engine updates.

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