Sun Adds Anti-Spam to Sun ONE

SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems this week inked a deal with anti-spam software maker Brightmail to augment its Sun ONE platform.

The deal announced Monday at the Burton Group Catalyst conference here includes SunTone certification for the Sun ONE Messaging Server, which the Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker says runs more than 220 million mailboxes. The updated version is available now from Sun.

With the cost of spam to enterprise corporate organizations now running into the billions — $8.9 billion in the United States and $2.5 billion in Europe according to Ferris Research — Sun says anything it can do to counter unsolicited e-mails is extremely important.

Sun ONE Communications Group Manager Patrick Dorsey told internetnews.com the decision to use Brightmail was not hard since Sun already uses the San Francisco-based message filtering company’s products internally.

“Our customers approached both of us about coming up with some type of solution, Dorsey said. “What we’re doing is offering customers a level of insurance against spam without installing two separate servers. And what you have is a thick pipe between the application layer and the software stack. We’re seeing 50 to 200 percent performance improvement over previous configurations.

Brightmail’s platform has access controls such as multiple authentication mechanisms and address verification preventing communications from unauthorized senders or invalid addresses. The platform also has support for the Mail Abuse Prevention Service’s Real-time Black Hole List to allow identification and blocking of e-mail from known spammers. Sun says end-users can still design their own e-mail filters – routing messages to folders or directly to the trash based on information in the message header itself.

The Sun ONE Messaging platform works under the Sun ONE Portal Server and in tangent with the company’s Instant Messaging platform and Calendar Server software, which it says has sold more than 100 million seats. The services let a customer’s workforce access info from outside the corporate firewall using Sun’s VPN-on-demand technology.