Press Release
Illegitimate email much higher than reported.
Santa Barbara, CA -October 29, 2003

Illegitimate email messaging over the Internet is currently greater than 90% according to Solid Oak Software, Inc. publishers of Alligate, a powerful anti-spam email gateway product. There are numerous recent reports that have indicated that spam accounts for 50-60% of all email traffic, however these figures are misleading according to Brian Milburn, president of Solid Oak.

"These numbers generally represent the percentage of spam that users actually receive in their mailboxes." says Milburn. "This does not account for the actual number of attempted message deliveries to invalid addresses, over quota mailboxes, and other undeliverable or undesirable mail."

Alligate works by acting as a gateway that accepts and analyzes all incoming email before it is forwarded to the real email server. It employs techniques to identify spammers with a minimum of wasted bandwidth. One technique used by Alligate is called "Adaptive Tarpitting". Alligate keeps a dynamic list of
recent spammers and when subsequent messages are received from the same source, intentional idle periods between commands are inserted to slow down the spammers throughput. The aggressiveness of this technique is automatically calculated based on the spammers prolificacy.

"A surprising number of spammers simply disconnect after a few seconds of idle activity. Very little data is exchanged, and this can save a considerable amount of bandwidth." Milburn says. "Alligate uses numerous methods at several points during the message receipt process including a highly advanced content
analysis engine that is remarkably accurate in detecting spam. Our goal is not only to eliminate spam, but to considerably reduce bandwidth consumption. Alligate can reduce SMTP bandwidth requirements by 40% or more."

In addition to Alligate, Solid Oak also publishes CYBERsitter, an award winning web filter with over 3,000,000 current users. Many of the Solid Oak's proprietary content management techniques used to identify objectionable web content were adapted for spam detection bringing almost nine years of content management experience to the anti-spam arena.

Alligate is a complete stand alone Windows based SMTP Gateway server. It supports any number of domains and destination servers on any platform. Alligate is designed to remove virtually all of the administration burden from system administrators.

More information:http://www.alligate.com