Press Releases by CGIDir

Sendmail Clean Messaging Innovation Receives U.S. Patent for Monitoring and Control of SMTP Traffic

February 5, 2007; 04:19 AM
Sendmail, Inc., the leading global provider of trusted messaging, today announced that it has been awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,146,402 for its Flow Control technology by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Sendmail Flow Control was developed to provide unparalleled visibility and control over the flow of email traffic to prevent unwanted connections in the form of targeted attacks, spam and viruses prior to network acceptance. Preventing unwanted traffic preserves valuable enterprise resources and ensures optimized messaging reliability and availability.

The Flow Control patent covers the processing of both inbound and outbound message flow based on a wide range of exacting criteria. By collecting broad statistics about the behavior of individual senders, sending hosts and netblocks, Flow Control can take a range of actions: stop attacks and unwanted messages; throttle back suspect connections; identify infected systems within the network; as well as maximize the flow of legitimate traffic for improved quality of service.

“The awarding of this patent reinforces Sendmail’s commitment to innovation and our leadership in trusted messaging,” said Donald J. Massaro, CEO, Sendmail. “As one of the key components in Sendmail's Trusted Messaging architecture for clean, secure, compliant and authenticated communications, our state-of-the-art Flow Control technology provides our customers the ability to conserve enterprise computing resources, defend against targeted attacks and eliminate unwanted messages by intelligently managing their mail streams.”

Targeted messaging attacks continue to rise, costing companies millions of dollars and putting businesses at risk. According to the most recent FBI study, 52% of U.S. enterprises suffered attacks within the last year, resulting in a financial impact of more than 15 million dollars. Through its real time analysis of traffic, Sendmail Flow Control allows organizations to detect and control unwanted and abusive email connections, preventing malicious attacks and eliminating the extra traffic that consumes costly enterprise computing resources.

"Fiserv provides expertise in information management products and practices to more than 70 financial services and health benefits organizations, each of which handles sizeable numbers of email transactions,” said Michael Kastern, lead systems engineer for Fiserv. “It is imperative that we have the ability to effectively manage those transactions to protect against activities such as denial of service or directory harvesting attacks. Sendmail Flow Control enables us to effectively protect against such activities, virtually eliminating events that compromise privacy or threaten system downtime.”

Flow Control is integrated with the Sendmail Trusted Unified Messaging Platform (TrUMP) announced in Q3 2006. In addition, Flow Control interoperates with the Sendmail commercial or Open Source MTAs, to enable management of SMTP connections at the gateway.

About Sendmail, Inc.

Sendmail is the leading global provider of trusted messaging for clean, compliant, secure and authenticated communications. Based on the world’s first Internet Mail server, developed 25 years ago by Sendmail founder Eric Allman, only Sendmail provides enterprises directory-driven, policy-based message processing to address both internal and external threats in a single, integrated and open platform. Large enterprises across 33 countries, including the majority of the Fortune 1000, rely on Sendmail to protect sensitive data and intellectual property, eliminate unwanted messages and effectively manage their mail stream to maintain brand and shareholder value, and comply with security and regulatory policies. Sendmail is headquartered in Emeryville, CA, with offices and distributors in Europe, Asia and North America. For more information visit www.sendmail.com or call 1-87-SENDMAIL.