Ford Partners With Mail.com

11 May 2000

Ford Motor Company Partners With Mail.com to Protect the Auto Maker's Corporate E-mail Infrastructure From Virus Attack

    NEW YORK--May 11, 2000--Mail.com, Inc. , the leading global provider of Internet messaging services for businesses, today announced Ford Motor Company, the world's second largest auto maker, has chosen to implement MailZone, Mail.com's e-mail firewall service, to protect the auto maker's more than 170,000 worldwide corporate e-mailboxes against viruses, spam, offensive and threatening content, and inappropriate attachments.
    MailZone is an Internet-based, platform-independent e-mail firewall solution that screens inbound and outgoing messages while they are still on the Internet. MailZone acts as a first line of defense ensuring infected e-mails do not reach their intended destinations, without the need for client-side software or hardware. Completely transparent to the user, the MailZone service effectively monitors and screens all e-mail, and eliminates the threat of rogue viruses from ever reaching the corporate network, providing an extra layer of protection and taking the burden off individual users. A low-cost, high value-added service, MailZone not only saves companies money, but can save their e-mail infrastructure as well.
    "Ford Motor Company, with its sophisticated messaging needs and numerous international locations, is an ideal client for MailZone," said Aaron Fessler, president of Mail.com's Allegro subsidiary. "MailZone is fully scalable and can be deployed immediately without the need for extensive testing and implementation."
    "Internet-based solutions like MailZone are needed because we've seen a major shift in the paradigm for how viruses are transmitted, particularly with the dramatic growth of e-mail as a mission critical tool for businesses," said Fessler. "Having a desktop fix may have been enough in the days of floppy disks, but the Internet -- and the speed at which information now travels -- requires that companies be able to deploy a solution operating at Internet speeds."
    Such concerns about the limitations of traditional anti-virus software were reinforced last week with the virulent "ILOVEYOU" virus, also known as the "Love Bug." MailZone was configured to block the virus in less than 20 minutes after the Company discovered it, instantly protecting all of MailZone's clients against the onslaught of a virus that was being intercepted at an extremely rapid rate.
    "While their competitors and peers scrambled to shut down their e-mail systems in self-defense, MailZone clients went about what they do best - serving their clients and making money," Fessler said. "We're proud of how we were able to protect our MailZone clients and look forward to providing the same assurance to the people at Ford, their business partners and the Internet community."