OzEmail Founders Unite to Fight the Scourge of Spam

14 March 2003

messagecare, a new company formed by OzEmail founders Sean Howard, Malcolm Turnbull, Trevor Kennedy and Andrew Kent, today launched its flagship service, SpamTrap, with a 30-day free trial for Australian email users.

"Unsolicited email is sent indiscriminately to millions of users across
the globe - we aim to stop it reaching users," said messagecare Chairman, Sean Howard. "During the first week of March, 22% of our
users' email was spam - junk email. We trapped it."

"Even more serious, though, is the effect that spam containing
pornographic material - including graphic images - might have on the
minds of young people who receive them," he added. "We estimate that this year each young Australian online will receive 500-600 offensive spam emails - nearly two each day."

Restricting this material through legislation is proving difficult as
most spam originates internationally. Since the cost of transmission is
extremely low, its popularity as a marketing tool by peddlers of this
type of material is growing at an alarming rate.

According to messaging research company, Ferris Research, spam cost US businesses close to $US9 billion in 2002 and that cost, this year, is likely to surpass $US10 billion. A breakdown of the costs revealed that 17% was attributed to help desk support, 44% to IT resources and 39% on lost productivity.

"This service was borne of my frustration of having each morning to wade through sometimes dozens of spam messages, most of them irritating, many of them offensive," said Mr Howard. "SpamTrap is designed to have an immediate impact on spam. Our service will reduce the amount of spam, like pornography, arriving in your - or your children's - email, instantly."

The SpamTrap solution is an easy-to-use filtering service that has been designed to reduce the amount of spam that reaches the inbox of any standard Internet mailbox. SpamTrap requires no software, no ongoing configuration and no maintenance of 'exclude' or 'include' address lists. To join the 30-day free trial, a user simply needs to send an email to join@spamtrap.net.au to receive set up instructions customised to their email program.

"SpamTrap is a 'set and forget' service. Once a user's mail settings are changed, there is nothing else they have to do - we do all the work for them," said Mr Howard. "SpamTrap has been created with three key goals in mind: simplicity, accuracy and effectiveness."

About SpamTrap

The technology and architecture behind SpamTrap has been designed and built to deliver a service that offers users high spam capture rates
without catching legitimate email. Key to the service's high capture rate is the ability to quickly identify and accurately match incoming mail messages against the SpamTrap Database of spam.

Using a global network of spam traps and proprietary collection techniques, SpamTrap collects and classifies spam email. A unique 'fingerprint' of each spam email is recorded and added to the SpamTrap Database.

The SpamTrap system then takes a 'fingerprint' of each user's incoming email messages and compares them against the SpamTrap Database. If a match is detected, it is declared spam and put in a message store for viewing and deleting by the customer.

SpamTrap's 'fingerprinting' technique protects the privacy of a user's
email because we never look at the email, just its 'fingerprint'. A
SpamTrap user is able to view their spam messages online by logging into to www.spamtrap.net.au.

A 12-month subscription to SpamTrap can be purchased online at www.spamtrap.net.au for $33 (GST incl.) after a trial user's 30 days
free expires.

About messagecare

messagecare, a privately owned company, was started in 2003 by the founders of OzEmail, one of Australia's largest ISPs, with a vision of creating a suite of value-adding services designed to enhance the
messaging experience of individuals, businesses and service providers.

With seven years of experience running one of the Southern Hemisphere's largest mail servers, messagecare understands the importance of protecting the integrity of email as a communications channel from adversaries like spam, viruses and pornographic material.