Barracuda Networks profiles spam

Barracuda Networks is profiling e-mail as it's received by antispam appliances in order to augment spam filtering based on the reputation of a sender. The Mountain View, Calif., antispam appliance maker on Tuesday plans to announce "Predictive Sender Profiling" as its latest technique to combat junk e-mail. Filtering e-mail is more effective by profiling messages and senders on the fly than by just looking up a reputation score in a database that's based on past behavior, said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management at Barracuda.

For example, Barracuda's appliances will follow links in e-mails like a Web browser would and determine the nature of a site before letting the message through, Pao said. Also, if a sender is attempting to send too many messages to nonexistent addresses the e-mail connection will be rejected, he said. The "Predictive Sender Profiling" is available at no extra cost for existing Barracuda Networks customers through a software upgrade.