Tuesday September 21, 01:20 PM

   Searching for spam - one message at a time?

   By Ingrid Marson, ZDNet UK

   An anti-spam vendor is providing a low-tech solution to messaging
   security - by employing people to sift emails to look for spam

   As the amount of spam continues to increase, companies are looking for
   solutions to increase the efficiency of filtering out spam and cut
   down the amount of time employees spend sifting for spam.

   Current estimates indicate that spam account from anything from 38
   percent to 65 percent of emails, according to figures from market
   researcher IDC and email security firm MessageLabs respectively.

   eProvisia LLC claims that manual sifting is the solution to the global
   problem of spam. It claims that its product, Spam Eradicator, is
   foolproof against spammers.

   "For the first time ever: 100 percent reliability in combating spam.
   Guaranteed," states the company Web site, although it gives no further
   details on the legal terms of this guarantee.

   The company claims to have a team of over 100 "trained screening and
   preselection specialists", who manually review all correspondence,
   approving important emails and discarding junk mail.

   Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos,
   said on Monday that the main problem with this approach, which has
   been proposed by other companies, is that legitimate email can
   mistakenly be blocked. He also pointed out that there are issues of
   confidentiality.

   Mikael Albrecht, a product manager at security firm F-secure, was also
   sceptical about the service, in particular its ability to scale.

   "Volume will be a problem - how will it manage to handle a huge load
   with just 100 people?" he said.

   These are not the only uncertainties surrounding the company.
   According to Web site eProvisia is based in Palymyra Atoll, a Pacific
   coral atoll 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. But according to the US
   department of the Interior Web site the atoll is uninhabited.

   eProvisia also claims to have customers in 40 countries and large
   money reserves, but points out in a footnote that not all the
   countries are recognised by the UN and its reserves are in Palymyra
   Atoll dollars, an internationally unrecognised currency.

   eProvisia was not immediately available for comment.