Bright Light Technologies Monday claimed to have created the one thing we all want — anti-spam in our e-mail accounts — and now plans to bring the service to the masses.
The e-mail services company Monday rolled out its free Bright Mail service to consumers, offering a means of eliminating spam from inboxes. The service was previously only available to corporations and ISPs.
“We want to let as many people as possible experience spam-free e-mail,” said Sunil Paul, CEO of Bright Light Technologies. “We are also using free Bright Mail to get immediate feedback on what future email services consumers would find useful in helping them gain greater control of their e-mail accounts.”
To produce Bright Mail, Bright Light identifies and filters out spam before the e-mail reaches the end user, unlike spam-filtering products which require user interaction.
Through Bright Light’s Probe Network, which boasts more than 35 million e-mail addresses, the service detects newly launched spam. Bright Light’s Operations Center (BLOC) specialists analyze the intruder and and issue updated rules to each customer’s Spam Wall, which includes software that identifies and blocks spam according to the BLOC rules.
Users can view the Bright Mail Inbox containing the extraneous e-mail to ensure that it does not contain any mail that they would like to keep.
In independent testing, Bright Mail has been shown to eliminate up to 90 percent of spam without accidentally categorizing legitimate e-mail as spam.
With a 34 percent response rate, 87 percent of beta users reported that they use Bright Mail for their primary Internet e-mail account, 70 percent said it solved their spam problem and 87 percent said they would recommend the service to a friend.
“Addressing the spamming problem is increasingly hot for many enterprises and ISPs,” said Jim Browning, senior research analyst with GartnerGroup. “Although there are increasing product options to address this, enterprises are realizing that running and supporting this in-house can be more
difficult than expected, and are increasingly interested in service-based options.”
A recent GartnerGroup survey of 13,000 e-mail users found that many are beginning to hold ISPs responsible for their spam problems. The survey also discovered that over 90 percent of Internet e-mail users receive spam at least once a week and almost 50 percent get spammed six or more times per week.
