SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., RSA Conference – February 5, 2007 – Sendmail, Inc., the leading global provider of trusted messaging, today announced that it has been awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,146,402 for its Flow Control technology by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Sendmail Flow Control was developed to provide unparalleled visibility and control over the flow of email traffic to prevent unwanted connections in the form of targeted attacks, spam and viruses prior to network acceptance. Preventing unwanted traffic preserves valuable enterprise resources and ensures optimized messaging reliability and availability.

The Flow Control patent covers the processing of both inbound and outbound message flow based on a wide range of exacting criteria. By collecting broad statistics about the behavior of individual senders, sending hosts and netblocks, Flow Control can take a range of actions: stop attacks and unwanted messages; throttle back suspect connections; identify infected systems within the network; as well as maximize the flow of legitimate traffic for improved quality of service.

“The awarding of this patent reinforces Sendmail’s commitment to innovation and our leadership in trusted messaging,” said Donald J. Massaro, CEO, Sendmail. “As one of the key components in Sendmail's Trusted Messaging architecture for clean, secure, compliant and authenticated communications, our state-of-the-art Flow Control technology provides our customers the ability to conserve enterprise computing resources, defend against targeted attacks and eliminate unwanted messages by intelligently managing their mail streams.”

Targeted messaging attacks continue to rise, costing companies millions of dollars and putting businesses at risk. According to the most recent FBI study, 52% of U.S. enterprises suffered attacks within the last year, resulting in a financial impact of more than 15 million dollars. Through its real time analysis of traffic, Sendmail Flow Control allows organizations to detect and control unwanted and abusive email connections,preventing malicious attacks and eliminating the extra traffic that consumes costly enterprise computing resources.

Flow Control is integrated with the Sendmail Trusted Unified Messaging Platform (TrUMP) announced in Q3 2006. In addition, Flow Control interoperates with the Sendmail commercial or Open Source MTAs, to enable management of SMTP connections at the gateway.