Moscow, March 6, 2006. Members of National antispam coalition — DATA FORT, an IBS IT Outsourcing Center, and Kaspersky Lab, a leading Russian anti-virus software developer —  have carried out a joint study of corporate mail systems in Moscow region.

The research was aimed to evaluate business significance of e-mail systems and detect typical problems arising before users in the process of operation. More than 200 directors and IT department managers of large companies in Moscow and Moscow region have been interviewed in the course of research.

As follows from the results, the most popular e-mail systems are Microsoft Exchange (52 %), Lotus Notes/Domino (8 %), and SendMail (7 %). Groupwise, PostFix and CommuniGate were mentioned among others.

About 65 % of companies use remote access to the corporate e-mail system.

Considering the issue of mailing services significance for the company business, the respondents pointed out that any serious failure of the mailing system would cause essential slowdown of work processes, whereas 14 % said that their business would stop at the moment of corporate mail system failure.

Among the key problems encountered by the users, which directly endanger uninterrupted operation of corporate mail systems, the respondents singled out the following:

• Spam and viruses — 41 %;
• Long period of mail delivery and slow work of the system — 35 %;
• Loss of messages — 13 %;
• Unavailability of mail server — 11 %.

Most companies (73 %) realize the urgent need of anti-spam protection and use dedicated software to protect their mail systems against the flood of junk mail. To prevent spam, 23 % of responding companies use nothing more but manually-adjusted filters built into server software used. About 4 % of companies ignore the problem of spam mailing.

So, despite predictions of experts about the forthcoming decrease of spam amount, it still presents a serious problem for corporate mail system users, along with e-mail operating speed.

As for corporate policies concerning the use of free mail services, 46 % of companies disallow their employees to use external mail resources to enhance information security.

As a whole, the culture of using e-mail systems is on the average level, as evidenced by a low percentage of using such options as calendars, task schedulers, and common folders. Only 34 % of respondents use these functionalities; in 30 % of companies these options are available but not used; the remaining 36 % of respondents stated these functions as unavailable. This situation is natural, since only 41 % of companies train their employees to use mail systems.