Panda Chooses Mailshell for Stopping Spam

Panda Software says it's dropping its own anti-spam technology and "going with a leader" by integrating Mailshell into the full range of its products, from enterprise security appliances to desktop consumer anti-virus products.

Anti-virus and security product maker Panda Software said Thursday that the company is dropping its own anti-spam technology to use an OEM anti-spam solution from Mailshell. The new anti-spam technology would be used in the full range of Pandas products, from enterprise security appliances to desktop consumer anti-virus products.

According to Patrick Hinojosa, chief technology officer at Panda, the company is adopting what it senses is the leading anti-spam technology available. "This product uses list-based and Bayesian detection for final scoring," Hinojosa said. "It will be updated on a daily basis."

Mailshells filtering technology determines a probability that a given message is spam, and rejects messages that get a score thats too high. He noted that the spam filtering thresholds are user-adjustable.

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According to the company, the Mailshell anti-spam engine can perform more than 300,000 checks to determine whether a message is spam. The company says the engine is self-tuning to make it highly accurate in detecting spam. "It gives a very low rate of false positives," Hinojosa said.

Authentication is not an anti-spam system, Larry Seltzer writes. Click here for his column.

Panda had been trying to use its own version of an anti-spam product, but it met with limited success. "It wasnt as good as we wanted it to be," Hinojosa said. He noted that getting the required databases built was expected to take longer than the company felt was appropriate to meet customer demand. Instead, "Were going with a leader in this technology," he said. "This will be in all of our products that have anti-spam."

Hinojosa also said the companys consumer-level products will get an infusion of enterprise-class technology in the form of an IPS (intrusion prevention system) already available in larger products.

"It will block viruses and worms, help protect against buffer overflows and perform behavioral analysis," Hinojosa said. "It will also do deep packet inspection." He said products containing the new anti-spam technology should be available before the end of the year.

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