July 15, 1999 Web posted at: 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT) by Carolyn Duffy

From...

(IDG) -- Start-up MsgTo.com is a service designed to eliminate unsolicited junk e-mail or spam. Available to corporate users and ISPs, the outsourced service recognizes and isolates machine-sent e-mail using an approach that differs from traditional e-mail filters.

"Our approach to the spam problem is that we concentrate on how the e-mail is sent rather than on the nature of the e-mail itself," explains Shawn O'Connor, senior vice president of the Bethesda, Md. company.

Here's how it works: An end user sends e-mail to someone who subscribes to the service. The service sends the e-mail originator a little test. The test consists of a randomly generated sentence in a box. E-mail senders are asked to click on a particular word in the sentence, something that machines can't do. The e-mail that fails this test is put into a folder for an administrator to review. An e-mail that passes this test is forwarded to the end user, and the sender's name and address are added to a list that exempts the individual from future testing. Administrators also can exempt certain types of machine-sent mail such as newsletters or pitches from e-commerce sites.

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"We give corporate customers control. They tell us what e-mail is legitimate, and we let that information through," O'Connor says. Users also can opt to receive a certain number of unsolicited e-mail pitches each month in areas of interest.

The MsgTo.com service offers tools that let end users categorize and prioritize e-mail by color code. It supports digital signatures and electronic business cards known as vCards, and it provides such common e-mail features as stationery, message forwarding, return receipts and attachments.

The outsourcing service will be available in a month or two, after an ongoing beta test is completed. Corporate customers will pay a monthly fee depending on the number of mailboxes purchased.

"It's a lot more cost effective to outsource e-mail than it is to maintain a Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange system - particularly for small and midsize businesses," O'Connor says. "One of the things that we bring to the fore is that we help stop spam so that employees won't waste any time looking at it."

For ISPs, the MsgTo.com service is designed to eliminate the junk e-mails that end users find so irritating. For example, 90 percent of e-mail users receive spam at least once a week and almost 50 percent get spammed six or more times per week, according to a Gartner Group survey of 13,000 e-mail users released in June. When the Gartner Group asked respondents if they would change ISPs to reduce the flow of spam they received 36 percent answered yes.

"It's an interesting offering," says Ray Everett-Church, counsel to the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "The concept behind the product seems pretty sound. If the recipient does not know you, then you have to essentially jump through a very small hoop that confirms you are a real live human being instead of one of those bulk e-mail programs. This has always proven to be an effective antispam technique in mailing lists and discussion lists."

Church says the challenge for MsgTo.com will be administering the spam test as the number of users increases. "They're going to face some significant issues in terms of the capacity of their Web site, but they seem to be addressing those scalability issues."

A beta version of the MsgTo.com service is available free at www.MsgTo.com (link below).