The Japanese-Californian company this week said it is shipping the first product to come from its partnership with Postini Inc, announced early this year. The Spam Prevention Service is currently a standalone product, but Trend expects to deliver a version integrated into its virus gateway in the second half of the year.

Postini’s offering catches spam using heuristics, about 1,000 rules describing the characteristics of spam. Incoming email is checked against all these rules simultaneously, and each piece is given a score for its likelihood of being spam. Administrators can set a level above which email is flagged as spam.

With Trend, the SPS software adds white-list and black-list filtering and the ability to categorize spam into five broad areas – bulk, commercial, sexual, hate mail, or solicitations to join get-rich-quick schemes.

Trend’s global product manager Jeani Boots said that under the default configuration, which tags email as spam at over about 50% confidence, the software catches 90% to 95% of spam, with an incidence of false positives conservatively estimated as 1 in 80,000.

As we’ve had the product in beta, we’ve never had any complaints about false positives, said Boots. Of course, it can be kind of hard to measure false positives. Administrators can have the product be aggressive on spam catching, or conservative on false positives.

Rival spam filter firm BrightMail Inc said its software only produces false positives about one time in a million emails, or one every ten days in the case of a firm that gets 100,000 emails a day. In the same hypothetical firm, the Trend system would generate one or two false positives a day.

When they get one [a false positive], it’s usually one of these gray-area emails, not a report to the CEO, said Boots. A gray area email would be something like a book-of-the-month club missive, which may or may not be spam, depending on the view of the intended recipient, Boots said.

The offering costs between $30 per seat per year for 25 users and below, with volume discounts down to $4. Trend also offers a standard discount of around 25% when it is purchased alongside its anti-virus product, said.

SPS is available on Solaris now, Windows 2000 next month, and Linux in May. Boots said a sub-$1,000 Solaris server with the software installed can easily handle spam filtering for a million emails a day.

In related news this week, yet another Outlook spam filter software firm announced its presence on the market. Qurb Inc was founded by the same people who founded AvantGo. The Qurb software, priced at $24.95 for an individual user, uses heuristics and an automatic white-list generator, both of which are pretty standard fare for an Outlook spam filter.

Source: Computerwire