Veritest, a subsidiary of global maintenance and testing company Lionbridge, has announced the results of its first round of benchmarking in the anti-spam software arena.

Veritest’s first round includes three packages, and here is how they fared..

For out-of-the-box performance, MessageLabs Anti-Spam Service and Finjan Software Internet 1Box tied for first, with Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall coming in a close second;

In a vendor tuned environment, MessageLabs again took top honors, with Finjan and Barracuda products tied for second.

You can view the drilled-down results (meaning how Veritest compiled them), at the VeriTest Anti-Spam Benchmark Service site.

MCI has upgraded their managed email services for business to include anti-spam and anti-virus enhancements, as well content control measures for both inbound and outbound traffic. This is likely a response to Symantec’s recent jump into the managed email space, and Spamroll will be looking for reviews from the “outside world” on both.

Meanwhile..

The addition of content control is an interesting one; something we are seeing a lot more of in the corporate realm. MCI’s enhancement is based on the MessageLabs Image Composition Analysis (ICA) technology, which uses artificial intelligence to scan the subject, body and attachments of email for pre-programmed key words. Its purpose is to prevent inappropriate, malicious and/or confidential subject matter from permeating the network.

See MCI Delivers Four-Way Protection With Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus Solution For Businesses from Rednova, for additional details.

Not unexpected, but Symantec, our fearless leader of producing 99% effective security protection tools, is going head on against Postini, MessageLabs, and the rest of the hosting family.

I assume that this service is being targeted at small businesses, much like Postini. Depending on pricing, hosted email is usually a cost effective solution for businesses whose core is not technology based.

Read more at Symantec Heads Into Hosted Waters, from TechWeb.

And, stay tuned for performance comparisons from the internal analysts of every hosted email provider on the planet.

Larry Seltzer of eWeek has an interesting op-ed entitled More Evidence Spam Has Peaked. Interesting, I say, as late in the article Larry points out a big reason why it might not have actually peaked (and why it may never go away).

Late, he notes that Postini, MessageLabs, Symantec, and others like them “don’t really have an interest in spam going away, because their sales are proportional to the level of threat. Ah ha.

Now we get to the root of the issue. These firms don’t have a vested interested in ridding the natural world of computer threats, whether they be spam, viruses, phishing, zombies, whatever. As long as the threats exist, these firms make a bundle convincing us they are saving us from them.

I personally rely on some of their wares, but only when running Windows, and then only as an “additional” countermeasure. I have a huge (and growing) block in my server’s Sendmail reject list, and make sure MailScanner is always running. According to industry reports, MailScanner has more users than AOL and Hotmail combined. The SpamAssassin component rarely fails me.

Funny thing is, this front end protection mechanism is open source, and is provided as part of the Linux distro this site runs on. THESE wares don’t cost anything extra, and they are distributed via the open source community. OS to the rescue once again.