New MessageLabs Anti-Spam Service Level Agreement Guarantees At Least a 95% Capture Rate and 0.0004% False Positives

LONDON, April 19, 2005 – MessageLabs, the leading provider of email security and management services to businesses, today demonstrated confidence in its MessageLabs Anti-Spam service by announcing a new Service Level Agreement (SLA) for customers. The new agreement guarantees businesses a spam capture rate of at least 95 percent and the assurance of a false positive commitment of 0.0004 percent.

MessageLabs Anti-Spam service features a multi-layered approach – including MessageLabs Skepticâ„? Anti-Spam predictive technology, Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam technology and additional layers of detection techniques – designed to stop all spam before it reaches corporate networks while ensuring that businesses receive legitimate email.

“In a competitive and often confusing anti-spam market for businesses, we are proud to be able to offer this level of certainty to organisations when choosing our services,” said Jos White, president of MessageLabs. “MessageLabs provides the strongest SLAs in the market and is committed to continued investment in the latest technology and the most robust infrastructure so that organisations don’t have to do it themselves. This ensures that we consistently surpass our service level agreements and stay one step ahead of the spammers – giving our clients time to focus on their core business.”

Supporting its new Anti-Spam Service Level Agreement, MessageLabs topped an independent group test of anti-spam products and services by VeriTest, the independent testing division of Lionbridge (Nasdaq: LIOX). The VeriTest Anti-Spam Benchmark Service awarded the MessageLabs Anti-Spam service the highest available five-star rating after observing an average capture rate of 99.29 percent and a false positive rate of 0.00 percent in the vendor tuned set of tests.

The VeriTest Anti-Spam Benchmark Service conducted a group test of a range of leading anti-spam solutions starting in November 2004, conducting six 24-hour period tests using a flow of email that contained approximately 70 percent spam and 30 percent legitimate email. VeriTest noted that MessageLabs’ false positive rate was consistently superior to other vendors tested and that the capture rate was consistently in the high 90s for both vendor tuned and out of the box tests.

“As spam continues to plague email users, it is important for industry leaders to ensure their offerings meet and exceed customer needs,” said Katrina Teague, vice president, Marketing and Solutions, VeriTest. “By working with VeriTest to ensure and promote the quality and performance of anti-spam solutions through rigorous competitive analysis and performance benchmarking, vendors can demonstrate their commitment to providing the most advanced solutions, as well as increasing customer satisfaction.”

MessageLabs’ customers benefit from a full range of SLAs that guarantee service performance, service availability, email latency and fault response as standard for all clients. The MessageLabs Anti-Virus SLA has for many years provided 100 percent assurance that no known or unknown email viruses will pass through its service to infect a client’s network. This agreement, along with the new Anti-Spam SLA, gives organisations a simple way to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of MessageLabs’ services.

MessageLabs’ range of email security and management services including Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, Content and Image Control, and Boundary Encryption, provides organisations with a complete managed email security solution, without the hassle, inconvenience or additional cost of traditional software or hardware solutions. These services ensure the integrity of electronic communications, helping businesses to manage and reduce risk while securing their critical infrastructure and business information.

About MessageLabs

MessageLabs is the world’s leading provider of email security and management services with more than 11,000 clients and offices in eight countries. For more information, please visit http://www.messagelabs.com

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