Santa Clara, California-based NAI has not disclosed the financial details of the deal, through which it has acquired all of San Mateo, California-based Deersoft’s intellectual property and assets, including its proprietary software for Microsoft Corp’s Outlook and Exchange products.

NAI’s first move following the closure of the deal has been to take Deersoft’s SpamAssassin line off the market, although the company is planning to continue to support all existing users and will replace SpamAssassin and its existing SpamKiller with a combination of the two products in the second quarter.

Specifically, the company will combine its McAfee SpamKiller desktop anti-spam software with SpamAssassin, with the result being released as SpamKiller Enterprise. The company is also planning to update its McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator in the second quarter to enable it to manage SpamKiller Enterprise as well as McAfee and third-party anti-virus software, firewall, gateway and email protection software.

In second half of 2003 NAI is planning to integrate the SpamAssassin technology into its WebShield Appliances and GroupShield mail-scanning products to enable users to scan for spam at the internet gateway and mail server, rather than on the desktop.

Formed in June 2002, Deersoft’s product line is based on the open source SpamAssassin product for Unix, which was created by developer Justin Mason in 2001 and is maintained by Mason and fellow Deersoft founder Craig Hughes. NAI said the two will continue to maintain the SpamAssassin project as NAI employees, but will devote the majority of their energies to the development of McAfee SpamKiller Enterprise product.

NAI said it had acquired Deersoft because its technology boasted the most sophisticated rules-based approach to spam detection available, which provided the advanced capabilities it required to take its consumer SpamKiller product to the enterprise. The SpamAssassin products analyze mail using heuristic scanning techniques in order to identify unsolicited and unwanted mail.

Spam became an increasingly frustrating and costly problem during 2002, with up to 45 spam emails a minute being intercepted by managed email security services provider MessageLabs. Spam is expected to rise from 25% of corporate email in 2002 to 50% this year according to Aberdeen Group.

Productivity, security and cost concerns related to handling unsolicited mail have led many users to look to their security software providers for answers, and NAI is certainly not alone in looking to increase its anti-spam capabilities. In December NetIQ Corp acquired privately held Marshal Software Ltd to add content monitoring to its portfolio, while anti-spam specialists such as BrightMail Inc, SurfControl Plc, CloudMark Inc and MailFrontier Inc are doing good business filtering unwanted mail.

Having acquired Deersoft, NAI is certainly not resting on its laurels. The company is planning more investment in product development and potential acquisitions to improve its portfolio, according to the company’s president, Art Matin. Network Associates’ acquisition of Deersoft is the first in a series of investments McAfee is making into anti-spam and content filtering technology, he said in a statement. With Deersoft we have acquired extensions to the leading open source ‘blacklist’ application and we will add applications that detect spammers even before they appear on blacklists.

Source: Computerwire