Surging levels of spam world-wide have made pre-delivery filtering vital to businesses according to email and internet security and management providers Netbox Blue, with the company's unique solution able to block 95% of all spam at the SMTP level.

Netbox Blue blocks more than 5,000,000 spam emails per month at the site of a small Melbourne-based business, letting through just 300 legitimate emails. Netbox Blue's unique pre-delivery filtering system stops 99.999% of the spam at the SMTP level, providing massive savings on download costs and ending the company's spam nightmare that almost sent them out of business.

Aged Care Software Group's Managing Director Ken Wragg, says prior to installing the Netbox, the company's internet and email was going down daily. Even when the company moved their web server off site, email was failing to get through due to the volume of spam hitting their network. Productivity was at an all-time low and frustration at an all-time high.

"I had seven and a half million emails in a single day and it took down our ISP," Mr Wragg says."I think every spammer on the planet had our details. It was crazy. If you're not getting your own email, you're dead in the water. It was a matter of fix it or go out of business and you can't afford not to fix it. Everything is running like clockwork now. Implementing the Netbox is the greatest thing we've ever done."

Netbox Blue Chairman John Fison says the staggering number of spam emails bombarding Aged Care Software is not uncommon. And blocking spam at the SMTP level is vital to prevent spam crashing a company's network and inflicting crippling download costs.

"The average size of a spam message over the last 3 months across all of our sites was 15 Kbytes. A company being hit by 5,000,000 spam emails a month is preventing 75 Gbytes a month of spam being downloaded with our unique pre-delivery filters. This would save them a huge amount on their download charges. If they were with Telstra, paying excess download charges of 15c/Mbyte, a traditional gateway filtering system would end up costing the customer $11,000 a month in download charges," Mr Fison says.

Netbox Blue's analysis of spam levels across more than 50,000 business customers globally shows that in the last two years spam has increased from 35% to around 90%, 95% of all spam is being blocked at the SMTP level.

Spam peaked in December 2007 at a record 91% of all email traffic seen across Netbox Blue's customer base in 15 countries.

"We are seeing dramatic increases in spam across all countries, particularly in Asia. Our expectation from the global trends we are seeing is that spam will only increase over the next 12 months and we are pleased that our technology, which includes dynamic IP reputation black listing and real time zombie host detection, will continue to protect our customers" Trent Davis, Netbox Blue's CTO says.

Netbox Blue's unique pre-delivery filtering engine analyses the email characteristics before downloading it to the company's network. This unique engine performs a series of eight high level checks using a centralized database of real time feeds from Netbox Blue's global network of datacenters and honeypots. Post reception, Netbox Blue's technology then analyses an array of attributes of the message including linked pages, image words, attachments (such as PDF) and known spam, hoax and phishing fingerprints to ensure only the cleanest of email is delivered onto a company's network. This is combined with the company's philosophy of zero false positives to minimize the administration and frustration often associated with other anti-spam products.

The effectiveness of this pre-delivery engine has been applauded by customers, like Phillip Crockford, Managing Director of Kinectix International.

"Spam was such an issue for our business that staff were each wasting an hour a day and getting very frustrated. As soon as we implemented the Netbox Blue appliance we saw dramatic changes. We received no more spam. What was even more remarkable was when we saw the reports showing how much spam had been blocked at the pre-delivery level. This really impressed us and resulted in big savings in our download charges."

Brisbane BMW saw over 20,000 emails being rejected as spam before being downloaded to the company's network.

"Spam emails have been dramatically cut down, some 20,000 per month are currently being eliminated. And since installing the Netbox Blue appliance we've not had any viruses in our email system whereas we had a few prior to installing the Netbox. NetBox Blue's product is something we confidently recommend," Brisbane BMW Managing Director Martin Roller says.