KEY POINTS:
A company that ran foul of advertising standards with racy adverts for its new anti-spam service has encountered a surge of interest from businesses desperate to clear their servers of junk email messages.
A group of IT industry veterans are behind Spam Dunk, a subscription service pitched at
small businesses that have their own mail servers but don't want to be burdened with the task of monitoring spam and virus filters.
"We want to be like the Rentokil pest exterminators of the internet business," said Nigel Lawry, co-founder of Hot Pipe, the firm offering Spam Dunk.
The service uses a range of off-the-shelf anti-spam and anti-virus filters with reporting and provisioning tools that let IT departments monitor the traffic coming through their mail servers.
The service is priced from $1 per email address per month and Lawry said Spam Dunk was now monitoring 30,000 email addresses after the unconventional advertising campaign which featured spoof adverts playing on people's frustration with spam emails carrying Nigerian financial scams and Viagra advertisements.
One advert features "Dr Obed of Nigeria", who outlines a $25 million get-rich-quick scheme many email users will hear a ring of familiarity in.
"To act as a relative of the deceased in return for 25 per cent of the monies, please send your bank account details," says Dr Obed.
All but one of the adverts, which were made by ad firm TBWA/Whybin, were taken off the air by Newstalk ZB and ZM stations after complaints. They were later allowed airplay again on ZM only.
Lawry said the adverts provoked calls from everyone from "mums with Slingshot accounts to city councils".
"At their end there's no real interest in understanding the technology. A lot of businesses don't really know what spam is, they just want the problem fixed," he said.
One of the companies co-opted into the Spam Dunk platform is global spam filter and firewall specialist Borderware, which has around 120 clients in New Zealand and provides security across the Government Shared Network, which links government departments electronically.
Dean Bell, Borderware's director for the Middle East and Asia Pacific, said he hadn't seen such a "mainstream" ad campaign for anti-spam services elsewhere, but that spam was coming in new and more intrusive forms so awareness of it was increasing.
"We're seeing a lot of PDF spam. No one ever deletes a PDF, because it could be an important document. Spammers are taking advantage of that," he said.
Voicemail spam and instant messaging spam were also on the rise, said Bell.
"The home is moving towards one converged box that does everything. But there's also the prospect of the phone ringing at 3am [with a voicemail spam message]."
Bell said anti-spam and anti-virus provisions were widely undertaken by internet providers to catch malevolent messages before their reached their customers, but that the systems weren't used to full effect to avoid so-called false positives - blocking genuine messages by mistake.
"I'd rather have 200 spam emails in my inbox than have one false positive," said Bell.
"It's not about content, it's about behaviour. We look at [internet protocol] reputation and IP behaviour and perform connection level rejections. That saves on downstream bandwidth to the ISP and on internal bandwidth as well," he said.
