With its latest release of anti-abuse software for Internet service providers, Cloudmark said it can virtually eliminate spam from the world’s e-mail boxes.

Cloudmark Authority 2.0 has added an Active Scan feature with re-scan capabilities as well as enhanced reporting features that improves spam detection to 99.6% and gets end users even more involved in the process that it did before.

“People might have declared the virus wars dead a year or two ago, but looking at the recent Storm worm, which is potentially the largest virus in the last two years, the sophistication and amount of economic advantage spammers are getting is growing,” said Dave Champine, senior director of product marketing at Cloudmark.

The company says it already correctly identifies and blocks spam with a 98% accuracy rate. With the new active scan feature, Cloudmark can catch four out of every five scans of the 2% it currently misses by using its re-scanning feature. The term re-scan may be a misnomer because rather than using a server’s computing power to perform scans a second time on suspect e-mail, Cloudmark is able to identify the unwanted messages through the stored fingerprint identity.

“The fingerprint identity never changes, only the classification of those fingerprints,” said Jamie deGuerre, vice president of technology services at Cloudmark. This way, rather than upload the messages again to a server and re-scanning them, Cloudmark can simply return a new classification on the fingerprint.

DeGuerre said that the increased accuracy also relates directly to savings in mail storage--approximately 1.6%. “While that may seen like a small improvement, it can save large ISPs over $750,000 annually,” he said.

This is based on the approximation of 100 billion messages, or10 terabytes of data, being stored on servers every day at a cost of about $13,000 per TB. More than 90% of those messages are characterized as abuse.

Re-scanning e-mail messages once they have been delivered to consumers often goes unnoticed because they typically check e-mail less often than business users. However, the Authority 2.0 software gives service provides the option of notifying users their mail has been scanned again.

Communication between the service provider and the user is also improved with the software’s intelligent reporting capability, which uses “programmatic access” to the Cloudmark Network Feedback System. The CNFS provides more feedback to users to let them know how beneficial their own efforts were in protecting themselves and other users form spam by identifying those messages that make it through.
“We wanted to help change the perception that the attackers are wining,” Champine said. “And the more we can put those [results] into the user experience and feedback channels, the more [users] will get that perception and feel they are part of the solution.”

Enhanced reporting is also available to the service provider in order to better respond to customer complaints.

Distributors of legitimate e-newsletters will be happy to know that the software’s Secure Unsubscribe feature reduces the number of newsletters that get identified as spam because users don’t trust the unsubscribe process.