Business-critical e-mail needs improved integrity

Increasingly, companies connect with vendors and suppliers, employees and recruits, partners and customers as well as the government, via e-mail as a first option. E-mail is also a critical enabler of e-government services around the world.

In these situations, a working and trusted e-mail infrastructure is essential. However, today's e-mail infrastructure is fractured due to the proliferation of spam as e-mail usage has increased. Anti-spam filters have needed to be turned up to keep increasingly sophisticated spam out of the network. This has caused a new problem--one of legitimate e-mails mistakenly classified as spam and not delivered to the inbox.

While the percentage of such instances is small, the impact is not immaterial.

"Current claims which put the range of false positives between 0.1 and 0.5 per cent underplay the problem," said Manish Goel, co-founder and chief executive officer of BoxSentry.