Business-critical e-mail needs improved integrity

The need for greater e-mail integrity has never been more important as e-mail has become the primary mode of communication for most connected businesses with, according to research firm IDC, an estimated 850 million commercial mailboxes worldwide.

Increasingly, companies connect with vendors and suppliers, employees and recruits, partners and customers as well as the government, via e-mail as a first option. E-mail is also a critical enabler of e-government services around the world.

In these situations, a working and trusted e-mail infrastructure is essential. However, today's e-mail infrastructure is fractured due to the proliferation of spam as e-mail usage has increased. Anti-spam filters have needed to be turned up to keep increasingly sophisticated spam out of the network. This has caused a new problem--one of legitimate e-mails mistakenly classified as spam and not delivered to the inbox.

Critical problem

While the percentage of such instances is small, the impact is not immaterial.

"Current claims which put the range of false positives between 0.1 and 0.5 per cent underplay the problem," said Manish Goel, co-founder and chief executive officer of BoxSentry.

"The numbers seem small but are in fact alarming as it translates to 10 to 50 e-mails missing out of every 10,000. With large organisations, service providers and governments handling millions of incoming e-mail each week, the disruption to the underlying business processes--and confidence therein--can be significant. We all assume that e-mail infrastructure is working properly, when in fact it is not."

Ferris Research estimated the loss to businesses at US$3.5 billion, including new orders, customer complaints, legal notices and tenders. In most instances, a receiver would never know if an e-mail was not delivered unless the sender followed up through some other means of communication.

Integral solution

To address this problem, BoxSentry, a provider of reputation and authentication technology solutions, has announced the launch of an e-mail protection product, BoxSentry LogiQ.

Developed to restore integrity in e-mail messaging infrastructure, LogiQ protects legitimate business communications that are presently being blocked or redirected to junk mail folders (false positives) by traditional anti-spam filters.

It uses a combination of sender identity, reputation and authentication techniques to validate and protect legitimate e-mail communication. Based on self-learning algorithms and industry-adopted authentication standards, BoxSentry said LogiQ complements existing e-mail security screening technologies.

"E-mail Integrity is essential for ensuring both senders and receivers have the confidence to say 'message sent equals message delivered', similar to the dependable nature of financial transactions," said Goel. "LogiQ is the first solution that tackles this issue head-on and we welcome similar initiatives from the industry with a focus on e-mail integrity as an addition to e-mail security."

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