Cloudmark has announced that BlackSun, a provider of Web hosting services, has deployed the Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin. The Cloudmark plug-in, alongside BlackSun's existing Apache SpamAssassin implementation, delivers higher message filtering accuracy and performance, as well as enhanced protection against spam, phishing and viruses for BlackSun's more than 30,000 email subscribers.

BlackSun's existing filtering solution wasn't able to stop the evolving spam and virus attacks, resulting in strain on system administrators, customer support teams and end users. BlackSun needed a new solution that would offer more advanced spam filtering and higher accuracy, while remaining in control of its local resources. BlackSun chose the Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin due to its integration into any existing SpamAssassin environment and its high accuracy. As a result, BlackSun was able to deploy the solution in less than an hour. This almost-instant integration meant that BlackSun customers could immediately take advantage of enhanced messaging protection and quickly saw a reduction in spam and malware making its way into inboxes. With the Cloudmark Authority plug-in deployed, BlackSun's filtering accuracy has improved to almost 99 percent with near-zero false positives. Further, more than 85 percent of all messages being filtered are now identified as spam and are blocked before it impacts customers, resulting in a subsequent increase in customer satisfaction and dramatically reduced customer support inquires.

Apache SpamAssassin is an open source platform for email filtering. The Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin seamlessly plugs into virtually any existing SpamAssassin infrastructure to instantly improve filtering accuracy and message processing performance. Cloudmark Authority detects messaging abuse with approximately 98 percent accuracy and near-zero false positives. Cloudmark's high accuracy is due to a unique combination of Advanced Message Fingerprinting technology and real-time corroborated feedback from Cloudmark's Global Threat Network system. In addition, by requiring only a fraction of the processing power of rules-based solutions and automatically distributing the latest threat definitions every 45 seconds, the solution frees IT resources and reduces hardware and datacenter-related costs.