Intermedia.NET  announced a new service to protect Microsoft Exchange mailboxes: SpamStopper. Available to all Intermedia.NET Exchange hosting customers, SpamStopper provides the ultimate defense against spam for customers. Custom-developed for Intermedia.NET’s Exchange environment -- which includes clustered servers and an EMC SAN -- SpamStopper offers advanced protection against spam, which represents over 66% of all email sent, and more than 10% of lost productivity, according to 2006 research.

“Spam can be a serious drag on business productivity,” said Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia.NET. “With the new SpamStopper product, customers of our industry-leading hosted Exchange can enjoy sophisticated spam protection built in to their service, with almost no management required on their part.”

Based on the open-source anti-spam engine SpamAssassin, the SpamStopper service was custom-tailored to Intermedia.NET’s infrastructure, and employs a sophisticated weighting system to classify email as ‘junk’. As well as anti-spam, it also includes content filtering to protect against bad headers and suspect attachments. SpamStopper complements the free anti-virus service, Antigen for Exchange by Sybari, a Microsoft company, which is included free with every Intermedia.NET hosted Exchange account.

Other features of SpamStopper include white and black lists, both at the account level for administrators, as well as at the mailbox level for individual end users to control. Mailbox owners can control their white and black lists directly from Outlook, with no need to go to a separate location in a browser. SpamStopper also allows customization of the anti-spam sensitivity level, so if a business relies on unsolicited email, for instance, it can lower the spam threshold to make sure that necessary communications are not blocked inadvertently, for example.