BoxSentry helps protect legitimate e-mail

SINGAPORE--E-mail security vendor BoxSentry says it can help businesses reduce the number of legitimate e-mail messages that get lost in spam filters, a problem that costs businesses billions of dollars annually.

Unveiling its RealMail e-mail authentication product to the media here today, BoxSentry CEO Manish Goel said the software reduces false positive rates to "virtually zero". False positive is the number of legitimate business e-mail messages lost during transmission due to classification error by spam filters.

Citing a study by Opus One, an enterprise network product specialist, Goel said current e-mail security products in the market have reported false positive rates between 0.16 percent and 0.85 percent. This means that for every 10,000 e-mail messages transmitted, between 160 and 850 e-mail messages are incorrectly marked by spam filters.

Goel noted that the false positive rate is higher when e-mail messages contain non-English language characters. As such, "the percentage loss experienced by enterprises in Asia tends to be even higher".

According to Ferris Research, lost legitimate e-mail messages cost businesses approximately US$3.5 billion annually worldwide.