The top three spam categories that were found were fraud, phishing and health, closely followed by adult content and jewellery. They highlight that fruadsters are using current concerns regarding the banking system to attempt to deceive customers into parting with their personaland financial information.

Maildistiller’s chief executive Ian Jeffers, said: ” The low level of legitimate emails points to an  increasingly hazardous email environment for personal and corporate email users. ”

Users still face problems with regards to viruses and other threats on a daily basis even though there is a range of software out there to tackle the problem. Businesses and the individual must try to combate this increasing problem.

 Maildistiller finished trails for its illicit image detection service, Image Analyser. This software is an extension of its managed service to protect companies from spam and viruses.The company has a research and development centre in Northern Ireland, Science Park, and is currently ahead of schedule for commercial launch.

Research has shown that 27% of companies have battled sexual harassment claims as a result of employee misuse of corporate email systems. This new software is to be used by the company’s Image Analyser and will be able to scan emails and attachments coming in to and out of the company’s email system and stoping those that it detects to be illicit.

Maildistiller has an aim of becoming one of the top 5 managed email filitering companies and is currently the largest provider in Ireland and filters on average 1.5 million emails every day.

Since the credit crisis there has been an increase in phishing during September and October, with a 103% increase, targeting mainly banks, credit unions and online retialer sites. Scammers are taking an advantage of the frenzy around the mergers and bailouts by targeting large banks like RBS, Bank of America and Lloyds.

MessageLabs is a US provider of messaging and web security to businesses worldwide. They intercepted 7,000 phishing attacks towards Bank of America, which doubled the next day. Mark Summer, the chief security analyst of MessageLabs, said, ” It’s crucial that everyone is aware of potential threats and is educated on how to avoid falling victim to them.” 

SonicWALL, another internet security company, saw the first phishing messages to hit the inboxes related to the banking-related crisis. Scammers were asking customers to verify personal information on theirselves using a false Chase Manhattan website.

Andy Klein of SonicWALL said: ” Banking customers will see a series of phishing emails asking for personal and finaicial details over the coming months and it is imperitive to stay alert during this period of uncertainty.”

Indentifiying phishing emails can be seen when an email will direct a customer to a website that will look identical, at a glance to their own banks website. If a customer enters the site and their own personal information, the bogus website is programmed to send this on to other sites with phisher controls. This information can then be transfered around different sites in a multi-layered concealment from law enforcement agencies.  

Enhancing its channel programme will be a key component in Mail Distiller’s drive to become one of the top five managed email filtering companies in the world over the next two years.

Earlier this month Mail Distiller appointed Ian Jeffers as chief executive officer and Jayne Campbell as sales director. Its newly installed CEO explained how the company would go about becoming a major global player in a market already estimated to be worth USD 300 million.

‘There are three components to the strategy – developing and growing our Ireland and UK partner channels (consolidating our positioning as the supplier of choice for managed email filtering in Ireland and the UK); securing channel partners in new geographical areas through value-added reseller collaboration; and continuing to evolve our service and licensing it to Internet service providers for branding and sale on their networks.’

Mail Distiller, which describes itself as the only email filtering specialist with data centres spanning the island of Ireland, says larger companies are increasingly taking advantage of the software as a service model to fight the spam battle.

While most of its business has traditionally been drawn from the professional services, logistics and financial services sectors, Jeffers says that the growth in its channel partner network has enabled the company to considerably broaden its end user base.

‘We work with our channel partners to tailor our solution to the markets they identify. Many of our larger partners only operate within one or two key verticals but we also have a large number of partners who provide solutions across the board. We are always on the look out for forward-thinking channel partners who can see the advantage of software as a service and the potential of building a recurring revenue model.’

Having established a strong presence in the Irish market and achieved customer wins in the UK, the next step is to reach further into overseas markets. ‘There is still a great opportunity to expand our business in the UK over the coming months and further afield, we are considering opportunities in the Middle East, Poland and the US,’ said Jeffers, who was positive on the prospects of opening offices overseas.

‘If the opportunity presents itself, we will be there. We are able to licence our service and operate it on networks other than our own, so it is also conceivable that we will develop strategic distribution partnerships with major providers who already have an established network within a specific country.’

Annual sales are running at around one million dollars and are rising by more than 20 per cent quarter-on-quarter. Headcount stands at 12 and that number is expected to increase over the next few months as the company recruits additional software development and sales and marketing staff.

‘While our sales will provide the medium term cash needs of the business, we plan to escalate our development programme to further enhance our email filtering solution and launch new additions to our product suite, such as instant message filtering, email archiving and web filtering,’ concluded Jeffers. ‘It is likely that the company will embark on a funding round to help speed up this development.’

Ian Jeffers, the former managing director of NTL Ireland, has taken on the role of Chief Executive with e-mail filtering firm Mail Distiller.

The four-year-old company was spun out of BT and has developed software that removes spam, virsuses and phishing attacks from e-mail. Rather than install the software at customer level, Mail Distiller provides it to companies as a managed service.

Mr Jeffers says the gola is to become the number five globally in e-mail managed services, a market that Gartner currently values at €300 million. “It’s an increasing trend that people want to shift away from a box solution,” says Mr Jeffers. ” It’s on the edge of your network so the spam is still using your bandwidth. You also have to worry about maintaining and managing it.”

Mr Jeffers cites figures which show that, globally, spam accounted for 76 per cent of all e-mails in May, with one in 170 of mails containing a virus and one in 265 being a phishing attack. The service Mr Jeffers’s company will offer will be available at prices from €5 per mailbox per month, but he says large corporations with lots of users will pay less than that. The product is currently sold through a network of partners.

Mail Distiller is backed by Belfast technology investors Crescent Capital which has provided £1 million (€1.26 million) in backing. The company is currently raising additional funding to develop a platform that could be licensed by partners to filter and archive not just e-mail but instant messaging and other forms of content.

Mail Distiller claims to filter more e-mail than any other provider in Ireland, which would give it a unique real-time insight into spam and other security threats. The company is currently developing an early warning service for new threats and is in discussion with financial services organisations that want to get instant notifications of phishing attacks targeting their customers.

The company provides filtering for 6,000 medical general practicioners in Northern Ireland, a group that presents particular challenges for anti-spam software. ” A lot of spam filters stop anything that contains the word Viagra, for instance.” says Mr Jeffers. The company employs “less than a dozen staff” currently and Mr Jeffers expects any future expansion to be in sales and marketing. Mail Distiller is currently looking at expansion into new markets, with the US, Russia and Poland currently under consideration.
“We filter mail in binary code so language is not an obstacle for the business – we can take this anywhere,” he says.

Mr Jeffers held a number of positions in London and Belfast with NTL after he left the Irish operation in 2005. He subsequently ” went sailing for a year”, which included being a crew member in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.

A record prize fund of £187,000 is on offer in this year’s InterTradeIreland All -Island Seedcorn Competition for fledgling companies.

Launching the 2007 competition Liam Nellis, InterTradeIreland’s chief executive, announed that £26M of additional equity investment has been leveraged by participants over the last five years, of which over £5m has been for small companies based in Northern Ireland.

“The experience of every company that has taken part in the competiton is that the prize money is simply the icing on the cake. The opportunity to access invaluable advice from some of Ireland’s top investment experts has helped them to raise significant additional investment and grow their businesses at an accelerated speed,” he explained.

Previous Seedcorn winners who have reaped the rewards of seeing their businesses blossom include Mail Distiller which has just announced a second “sizeable” investment deal with Crescent Capital. The company had already clinched a £500,000 injection from the investment company in 2006.
The chief executive of the Carrickfergus firm, Colm McGoldrick, said: ” I think the competition is a tremendous reality check and a process worth going through, You make some excellent contacts along the way and it is a good method of getting in front of a group of people at the top of their game in Ireland. ”

“It is a level of access I don’t believe exists elsewhere. These things alone make entering the competition worth the effort.”

To register an interest in entering the All-Ireland Seedcorn Business Competition, log on to www.intertradeireland.com/seedcorn. Business plans must be submitted by 5pm on the closing date of September 28.

Published in the Belfast Telegraph business supliment Monday, April 20th 2007

The problem was that GPs were being inundated with SPAM which was seriously impairing GP practices’ ability to provide both patients and suppliers with a good quality service via the e-channel.
Now with the implementation of Mail Distiller 3, Steria can manage the email addresses of more than 5,000 GP practices throughout Northern Ireland and allow GPs to focus on pure, clean email.

Steria’s decision to choose Mail Distiller was heavily influenced by the fact that, as a hosted solution, set-up of Mail Distiller 3 is rapid and implementation requires little or no lead time. A short trial was enough to convince the team at Steria and DIS that this was a service that not only delivered 99.8% spam- and 100% known virus-free email but also reduced by a huge amount the volume of genuine email being intercepted.

Mail Distiller’s unique methods for intercepting SPAM and other maliciouscontent, and its industry-leading low false-postive rate, were the key reasons that Steria selected the solution. Now email from bona fide patients and suppliers gets through and rubbish is kept out.

“The Mail Distiller solution hit the ground running for us from the second it was implemented”, says Brian McKeown, Director of DIS. “The feedback from GPs is that there has been a sea-change in email performance. Pre-Mail Distiller, email was unreliable and chock-full of time-wasting content. Now, GPs have reclaimed their inboxes.”

Paul Wickens of Steria agrees. “The Mail Distiller solution just works and the fact that it is a true, on-demand, Web 2.0 platform means that we don’t have to worry about expensive upgrades or database management – the Mail Distiller team takes care of that. We looked at the so-called market leaders in hosted email and came to the conclusion we wanted more. Mail Distiller gave us just what we needed.”

Colm McGoldrick, CTO, says, “The continued endorsement of Mail Distiller by strategic partners such as Steria is testament to the quality of the managed service offering from Mail Distiller. Mail Distiller is delighted to be responsible for giving doctors their email box back again.”

Dr Bryan Keating, Deirdre Terrins and Colm McGoldrick of MailDistiller celebrate the success of their groundbreaking email security solution

Belfast, August 29, 2007 – Mail Distiller, the provider of hosted email protection solutions for businesses, today announced a huge growth in its business over the last 6 months. The announcement from the award-winning company coincides with the launch of a new version of its software and a huge growth in the number of partners now actively selling the product. Mail Distiller now has over 50 partner companies based across the UK and Ireland and has seen growth of 128% in user numbers in the last six months.

Mail Distiller’s product resides on the Internet and filters spam, porn and other malicious content from corporate email. This means that email boxes are kept free from clutter and potentially damaging content. The product also ensures that users always have access to email even if their own company mail servers go down. Although Mail Distiller sells its products across the UK and beyond, several local companies are already avid users of Mail Distiller.
Tommy O’Neill of Progressive Building Society chose the Mail Distiller product because of the security and peace of mind it provided. “Mail Distiller provides us with an additional layer of defence and security before mail even hits our firewalls. The anti-malware and email contingency features are great bonuses as well.”

Ballymoney Borough Council is also an avid user. According to David Wright, IT Manager at the Council, “The team at Mail Distiller is very helpful and willing and is backed up by very capable technical resources. Using a web interface makes the system very easy to manage and there are no complicated systems which users have to be trained on. The availability of Mail Distiller is excellent and in the 18 months since implementation, we have not experienced any down-time. We can now provide a more efficient service to our ratepayers and other stakeholders.”

Colm McGoldrick, Mail Distiller’s Chief Technology Officer is in no doubt why the company has suddenly surged in popularity here and across the UK and Ireland.

“People are waking up to the fact that our solution works. Partners love it because it helps them make more money and users find that suddenly they can get back the kind of email experience they once had. We are now firmly positioned as one of the leading providers of this type of solution in the UK. That’s a great position to be in.”

The Carrickfergus based company, which was spun out from BT in 2004 provides a range of e-security software tools that knock out spam, viruses and other malware before they hit a company’s network. Customers include Norfolk Line Ferries and the Progressive Building Society. The company has eight full-time and two part-time employees and sells exclusively through an extensive network of channel partners throughout Ireland and the UK.

In November 2005, the company won the Belfast Region of the all-island competition and with it a cheque for 20,000 euros. But although the money was put to good use in a growing business, the competition also brought long-term strategic benefits.

“Entering Seedcorn enabled us to get a proper focus on our business plan and gain a lot of insight into the market we were serving. It also gave us exposure to venture capital and ultimately helped introduce us to the company that subsequently invested in us” says co-founder and interim CEO Colm McGoldrick.

The invest in question was Crescent Capital, one of Northern Ireland’s best known venture capital (VC) firms, which in June 2006 bought an equity stake in MailDistiller for 500,000 euros. MailDistiller is now negotiating second-round funding , which it plans to use to expand the business into Russia and North America, again through channel partners.

NcGoldrick believes Seedcorn has given MailDistiller the momentum it needs to survive the testing early years. “In our experience, Seedcorn is a competition that equips a business with the ability to take on external money – be it an angel investor, VC, bank funding etc. It was a very good vechile for learning, especially for young enterprise such as ourselves.

The Seedcorn competition, which is in its fifth year, aims to spark entreneurial activity on both sides of the border by offering cash prizes and businessconsultancy to successful entrants. The overall 2006 winner was Enbio, a medical devices campus company based in Cork Institute of Technology, which took home a cash prize of 100,000 euros for its efforts.

Published in the ‘All-Ireland Business’ Spring 2007 suppliment in the Belfast Telegraph in association with InterTradeIreland.