Email is a vital communications channel for organizations of all kinds — from corporations to educational institutions and government agencies. As a result, email systems have become an even more important component of their information infrastructure. But with the significant growth of spam, viruses and other types of email-borne attacks in the past year, system managers are finding it more challenging to manage and protect this critical communications asset.

Costly Spam Attacks Are on the Rise
While email-borne viruses continue to be a problem, unsolicited commercial email, or spam, has become the fastest growing and most troublesome email security issue. In 2002, Postini™ documented a 150% increase in spam across our customer base. Out of the more than 9 billion messages we processed in 2002, more than 60% of those messages were identified as spam. Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs) — a technique spammers use to collect thousands of email addresses and then launch massive spam attacks, continue to fuel the growing volume of spam.

Junk Email is a Corporate Burden
Spam is more than just a nuisance. According to Ferris Research, "the total cost of spam to corporate organizations was $8.9 billion" in 2002. Many corporations report that they receive more junk email than legitimate email, causing corporate email users to loose the convenience factor electronic communications provides. Some experts even suggest that if corporations don't take more aggressive measures against spam now, email could become unusable by as early as 2004.

WMIS Hosting has partnered with Postini™ to protect you from junk mail and viruses.
Postini™ services secure and manage email systems, without the need for software or hardware. Using patent-pending pass-through technology (versus store-and-forward methods), email bound for a company's email server is processed in real-time through a highly secure service architecture.

Within milliseconds, Postini's award-winning email security solution separates spam and viruses from legitimate messages. Legitimate email is instantly passed on to the destination mail server. Suspicious email can either be quarantined in a web-based, password-protected message center for administrator or end-user review, or tagged and delivered. The entire process is fully automated — valid emails pass through and cannot be physically accessed by any persons other than the recipient.

Signup today for WMIS Hosting, order your own domain name, and get started with the joy of non-intrusive and safe email for your business and/or family.