PUREmail kept Mydoom at bay

February 5, 2004

San Ramon-based filter tries to be accurate in prevention

By David Morrill

SAN RAMON -- For a moment, Raj Baronia, chief executive officer and president of Genius Technologies, felt emotional uneasiness tweak his stomach.

While going over the log of e-mails that his company's e-mail filtration service, PUREmail, had pulled from his clients two weekends ago, one in particular caught his eye -- it had all the signs of a virus. However, when he searched the Internet and anti-virus software for any information on this new virus, he found nothing.

"It was a real disappointment because I thought our technology that we had spent the last two years building was flawed," Baronia said. "It was a real bad feeling."

The following Monday, he heard on the radio news about the now-infamous e-mail virus "Mydoom," and his worries were replaced by pride that his product had stopped the virus from entering client e-mail systems.

Based on the fact that there was no word about the virus when his service first intercepted infected e-mail, Baronia concludes that with PUREmail his company was among the first to detect Mydoom.

"It was a big relief cause it showed that PUREmail did what it was supposed to do," he said. "It screened out the e-mail that people don't want."

Genius Technologies is a privately held company based in San Ramon that is currently in the incubation process. PUREmail is the company's primary service and could be spun off to a separate company sometime in the future, Baronia said. The company currently employs about 12 people.

PUREmail has a proven track record with virus protection, the company says, but the service's primary goal is to provide a more accurate way to filter spam.

"Anti-virus protection technology is not rocket science," Baronia said. "Instead of focusing on something that already is a pretty mature technology, we wanted to find better ways to control spam, which is a much bigger problem."

PUREmail is targeted at businesses or individuals that have their own e-mail domain that can be routed through PUREmail's service. The price varies depending on the number of users on the domain. It can be set up in a couple of hours.

An advantage of PUREmail being an external system is that the system blocks unwanted e-mail before it gets to the user's system, where damage could be done, Baronia said.

One of the biggest problems Baronia sees with commercial e-mail systems, such as Yahoo and Hotmail, that have spam e-mail blockers, is that most take a one-size fits all approach. While the sensitivity of what passes through usually can be adjusted, there really is no way to make precise decisions on what the user wants and doesn't want, he said.

"One thing we like to say at our company is that there is no such thing as junk mail because what is junk to you may not be junk to someone else," he said.

Each service user is given a comprehensive menu of commonly used commercial categories, which they have the option of denying, approving or reviewing at a later time. PUREmail goes through a very comprehensive screening process, looking not just at key words within the e-mail but also the document as a whole to detect whether it is spam.

For instance, the program can differentiate an e-mail from a doctor to a patient who talks about Viagra versus an advertisement on the product.

Each user is sent a daily report on the number of e-mails that were screened out in each category, and have the option of logging into the external site and retrieving some of the filtered e-mail if desired.

David Morrill can be reached at (925) 416-4805 and
dmorrill@angnewspapers.com.