Email security and management services provider, MessageLabs, has teamed with Symantec and announced enhancements to its global anti-spam infrastructure.

MessageLabs is currently deploying Symantec’s latest traffic shaping technology across its global network of 14 data centres at the outermost perimeter of its infrastructure. 

“With spam accounting for 73 per cent of email in 2004, MessageLabs is constantly looking at new ways to improve our global infrastructure and enhance our services to our customers,” said Jos White, president of MessageLabs.  “By adding another layer of protection to identify known spam at the outermost edge of our network, we are able to further concentrate our own technology on identifying new spam and other malicious threats to keep our customers’ email clean.”

“This also highlights the benefit of businesses adopting managed services – we invest in the latest technology on behalf of our customers to protect them, rather than our customers having the hassle and expense of doing it themselves.”

Symantec’s technology shapes email traffic at the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) level, decreasing the volume of inbound spam as spammers increase the volume.  It identifies abusive senders and throttles their connections back at the network level, ultimately forcing the originator of the messages to alter the rate at which packets are placed on the network.

It uses standard features of the TCP/IP protocol such as error correction and quality of service to control the sender.  This slows the flow of packets into the MessageLabs network and can cause the traffic to back up on the spammer’s servers rather than forcing MessageLabs to receive, identify and then handle known spam on behalf of customers.

“Abusive senders are slowed, often dramatically, and legitimate senders are actually accelerated since they are no longer competing for the same resources with abusive senders,” said Enrique Salem, senior vice president, gateway and network security of Symantec. “By shaping at the TCP protocol level, MessageLabs can reduce the volume of unwanted messages targeted at its customers, freeing up bandwidth on its global infrastructure.”

MessageLabs and Symantec announced their technology partnership in September 2004.  Under the agreement, MessageLabs has integrated Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam technology alongside its own proprietary Skeptic predictive anti-spam technology.