IronPort looks to be e-mail's guardian

"E-mail is broken, and we're going to fix it," says Scott Weiss of his company IronPort Systems. That's quite a claim, coming from the CEO of a start-up that was founded just three years ago and hasn't yet turned a profit.

Few people would argue with the first half of Weiss' statement, given that spam, phishing, viruses and other abuses are making it difficult to trust e-mail. But fewer still would agree that one company can single-handedly cure all the problems that plague e-mail.

But in the crowded market of companies trying to chip away at e-mail abuse, Weiss says he believes IronPort is poised to take a leading role. "It's our ball to fumble," he says.

"We're looking at [IronPort] as a potential top player in this market," says Sara Radicati, president of analyst firm The Radicati Group. IronPort's appliance approach to fighting spam, which the analyst group favors, combined with its strength in U.S. and European corporations and effective channel strategy, make the company a contender.

The anti-spam market is crowded, to say the least - Radicati says there are about 300 companies currently selling some sort of spam protection - as vendors rush to provide solutions to a problem with an exponential growth rate. IronPort's competition breaks down into three main groups; companies such as CipherTrust, Mirapoint and Proofpoint that also sell appliances armed with anti-spam technology; enterprise software companies such as Symantec, MailFrontier and Cloudmark; and service providers such as Postini and FrontBridge.

However, Radicati says there are a number of companies vying for that spot. It seems this market is not one company's ball to fumble just yet.

IronPort makes Mail Transfer Agent gateway appliances, which are used mostly by large companies and ISPs to send and receive e-mail while filtering inbound messages for spam and viruses, and outgoing traffic for adherence to corporate and regulatory policies.

Although IronPort's anti-spam filters are licensed from Symantec and its virus protection from Sophos, the company has developed a number of related offerings in-house. These include a reputation service that rates a sending history of an IP address and its Bonded Sender program that certifies legitimate bulk e-mail senders.

The company also owns SpamCop.net, a service it acquired last year that lets e-mail users report spammers. The service has been the target of lawsuits by e-mail senders who feel they've wrongly been labeled spammers - in fact SpamCop's Web site asks for donations to be used in its legal battles. Earlier this month SpamCop settled a case with Optinrealbig.com, in which the e-mail sender charged SpamCop with defamation and unfair trade practices. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Weiss says IronPort is looking beyond just fighting spam to network abuses as a whole because organizations are dealing with more serious threats than the headaches of junk e-mail. So is the rest of the industry; few vendors are selling just anti-spam filters as they jockey to meet companies' e-mail security needs.