A recent report by The Radicati Group selected five anti-spam  vendors - Clearswift, CloudMark, Postini, SurfControl and Tumbleweed - as 2004's top suppliers of products or services that detect unwanted e-mail. The research firm made its selections in part to help companies choose effective products in what has become a market overrun with "me too" offerings. Radicati's rankings are based on the companies' technology, vision, innovation, history and financial stability. Tumbleweed, SurfControl, CloudMark and Clearswift sell anti-spam software that sits at the edge of a company's network, and Postini offers a hosted service that filters incoming mail for unwanted messages. Radicati recommends companies pick an anti-spam vendor that also offers other secure e-mail protection, such as anti-virus, content filtering and message encryption.

Recognizing the importance of e-mail and the popularity of Microsoft Outlook, ePeople last week pulled the two together as part of a new client for their server-based collaboration software. With Version 5.1 of ePeople Teamwork, the company is adding support for Outlook as a client, letting users have a collaboration environment that will capture and integrate e-mail-based conversions from within the Outlook interface. The idea is to let companies integrate all the information gathered from applications and collaborative software, including e-mail, into a central location without having to train users on new client software. EPeople has added a set of buttons to the Outlook interface and a folder where a user can access his Teamwork spaces on the ePeople server, which integrates with software from PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel. E-mail sent to workspaces on the ePeople server also appears in users' Outlook mailboxes with an indicator. The server costs $20,000, and the per-user licensing is $1,200 per year. A hosted version is available, starting at 10 users for $480 each per year.