Cisco Systems to buy IronPort Systems, which owns SpamCop

I just learned that router maker Cisco Systems, Inc. is in the process of purchasing IronPort Systems, Inc, for $830 Million, US, in cash and stock options. IronPort is in the anti-spam and anti-virus and and website security fields, and is the owner of SpamCop, of which I am a reporting member. That's why this acquision interests me.

SpamCop started out in 1998 as the property of Julian Haight, and is a website where members can paste the contents of spam and scam email messages to have them reported to the ISPs and web hosts involved in the delivery of those messages. SpamCop processes over a million spam reports a day and maintains a list of the ISPs through who these spam/scam messages are being sent. Referred to as the SpamCop Blocklist (SBL), that list of spammers and the unsecured computers they also use to relay their garbage is used by email systems around the World to identify and flag much of the incoming spam that floods the Internet everyday.

I use MailWasher Pro to screen and filter all incoming email and it consults the SBL to see if a message has already been identified and flagged by SpamCop, and adds it's own flag to the Status column to warn me about it. When I see a message flagged by the SBL and I bother to investigate, I find that it is spam, 100% of the time. MailWasher Pro also has a place to input your SpamCop login id and includes a checkbox to report spam via that account. You must respond to an automatic reply from SpamCop and go to your report manually to finish submitting it, but you are saved the hassle of reading the source code and copying and pasting it into the SpamCop reporting field yourself.

In June 2003, SpamCop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of IronPort Systems, Inc, which is a security software and solutions company. IronPort Systems, founded in 2000, is the leading email and Web security products provider for organizations ranging from small businesses to the Global 2000. And now, both become a division of the leading router manufacturer in the entire World, Cisco Systems. In case you didn't know it, the Internet runs on Cisco routers. This acquision will add a lot of financial backing to IronPort and SpamCop, to help them in their fight against the scourge of spam that inundates inboxes every hour.

By the way, you too can become a reporting member of SpamCop, for free, by visiting www.spamcop.net and signing up for a reporting member account. There are rules to follow and things you must learn to do, in order for your reports to be effective, but it is well worth your time to help report spam, rather than just deleting it.

Often, home or business computers are used to relay spam, unbeknownst to their owners, and a SpamCop report to their ISP may result in their account being suspended until they disinfect those computers. Other reports discover vulnerable email servers which can be secured after the owners are notified with a SpamCop report. Sometimes those reports lead to the termination of email and Internet access accounts used by the spammers/scammers themselves. In the case where a website is advertised in the body of a spam message, the hosting company is notified and that website will often be terminated for violating the Terms Of Service agreement.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, MailWasher Pro is a valuable tool for screening your incoming email and deleting spam before you download it to your email client's inbox. I have written about this product on my blog and have devoted an entire webpage to describing it. If you are plagued by spam and use Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or any other POP3 email client to download your messages, MailWasher Pro can help reduce the flood of spam to a trickle.

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