Government agencies are rushing to implement a directive issued last week by
State Services Commissioner Mark Prebble to audit their e-mail systems in the
wake of the problems at Police, and AfterMail looks well placed to cash in.
Its archiving software helps by removing duplicated attachments and it last week
released an add-on software tool specifically to help customers track down porn.
The start-up, founded in October 2003, employs 15 staff including two in
Britain
and already has 16 government agencies on its books.
Chief executive Rod Drury says AfterMail's e-mail software can slash the time
needed to audit e-mails and check for objectionable content.
This is because it stores only a single copy of any attachment, even if it has
been sent multiple times to different staff in separate e-mails.
When AfterMail analysed its own e-mail archive, it estimated it had received
300,000 e-mails with 64,000 attachments but found only 2000 unique attachments
greater than 10 kilobytes in size.
This meant an assessor only needed to look at 3 per cent of e-mails to check
the archive for suspect images and ? viewing images at the rate of 70 per minute
? was able to complete the job in less than 30 minutes.
The porn-finding tool makes the job of assessors easier by sorting attachments
by file size, type or by the possible presence of "flesh tones" in images, which
might indicate pornographic content.
Once sorted, assessors can view each attachment and with a single keystroke attach
a numeric code to each image to indicate whether it is pornographic or objectionable,
and if so, to what degree.
Mr Drury says they can do this without having to open every e-mail and without
seeing whose e-mail they are looking at ? removing concerns they might have about
dobbing in the boss, for example.
If an image already categorised as pornographic is received in a subsequent e-mail,
AfterMail can automatically send out an alert.
AfterMail's software also lets organisations see how an image was received into
an organisation, where it went, who sent and received the image, and where it
is stored.
Mr Drury says this means employers can quickly work out who is a passive recipient
of porn, who is an "image archivist" and who is an active trader of images.
AfterMail won a technical excellence award at the Consensus Software Awards in
Australia
last week and has won 60 overseas clients.
It was named "emerging company of the year" at the Hi-Tech awards in November
and earlier this month announced six-figure wins with customers in
Luxembourg
and the
US
.
"There are plenty of traditional e-mail archiving vendors out there," says Mr
Drury, "but what we are seeing is the benefit of the knowledge-management approach
of storing structured e-mail data in a relational database."
Scorpio Network Solutions Ltd is delighted to be a strategic partner of Aftermail
in the
UK
.
As a result of the lack of government guidelines for IT systems management, only
a few organisations have taken the decision to ensure that emails are correctly
archived, indexed and recoverable, but times are changing. The reality is that
for legal compliance, data held in emails should be stored in a secure archive,
with quick retrieval and with all events surrounding any email, audited.
AfterMail delivers ?single instance? message and attachment archiving for all
leading email products, ensuring organisations are able to capture, store, retrieve
and analyse the most prevalent form of business communication: email.
AfterMail provides value for all business stakeholders:
? Reducing risk by ensuring that you have a record of all commitments made by your
organisation.
? Retaining knowledge by capturing all messages with the ability to search and
report on these.
? Leveraging your investment in IT by managing email more effectively, and reducing
the storage and management required.
? Providing easy access to your mail store for all authorised users and rich search
tools.
? Ensuring business continuity by providing secondary access to your email system.
Aftermail works equally well with Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes and clearly Microsoft
Exchange 5.5 through 2003. In fact this is where this solution comes into it?s
own by being implemented before a migration project, it then captures all of the
historical mail from any medium. Once a ?clean? install of the new email system
is complete, ALL of the archived data is available online to each and every user.
There is no need to re-propagate from the archived store to the old email system
which is cumbersome, costly and unstable.
Please contact us directly for more information on how easy Aftermail is to implement
into your organisation.
