FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 23 March 2004

MailGuard launches outsourced business email archival solution

New regulations and penalties ensure incentive to comply with regard to retaining emails is high

MailGuard, Australia's first and leading provider of outsourced email anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering for the SME market, has launched a new service - SafeGuard™, the company's outsourced business email archival solution.

After piloting the service over a three month period with ten clients, all ten converted and today use the service in addition to using one or more of MailGuard's email anti-virus, anti-spam or content filtering solutions

With increasing concerns and understanding, supported by growing legislation, of the importance of a company's emails (sending and receiving) to its ongoing business, MailGuard's SafeGuard offers a simple, automated solution to email archiving and storage issues.

"In today's corporate world, email holds a company's critical information. Emails record financial expectations, sales are made, customers make complaints and companies make promises," said Andrew Johnson, MailGuard's Marketing Director.

Increasingly pressured by fines and threats of imprisonment for noncompliance with federal and state regulations, IT executives today are looking to deploy systems that archive their email communications. For many organisations, this results in an organisational and storage nightmare - and automating that process is critical.

"We estimate that 60 percent of internally and externally related business information is stored within corporate messaging systems," adds Johnson. "And it can only continue to rise as our dependency on email communications increases."

Chris Clark, Group IT Manager, Multiplex Limited embraced SafeGuard and has his 1,300 users' email archived by MailGuard. "Organisations are simply unaware of the costs involved in archiving and retrieving emails. It is much more than the initial purchase of one or two servers, which is between $20,000 to $40,000. To enable a structured approach to archiving and retrieval of your company's emails requires a dedicated person designing and maintaining a process adhered to so as to ensure access to essential but corrupt or lost emails can be retrieved virtually immediately. We receive between six and eight DVDs monthly from MailGuard with the previous month's company-wide emails stored. It just couldn't be simpler, more secure or cost effective," maintains Clark.

Warrnambool Cheese and Butter Factory is one of the organisations that piloted MailGuard's SafeGuard. "We realised the overwhelming need to save these emails. My IT team just can't pack them away like receipts you toss in a box at home. They must be organised and easily accessible. When an archived email is needed, you don't want to have to call in half the IT team just to find it." said Stan McCullagh, IT Manager, Warrnambool Cheese and Butter Factory. "If you haven't been saving this stuff in an organised way, the ability to go in and pull up certain messages (which may have been deleted!) from specific days two years ago is not an easy thing to do. You would have to have sophisticated software and trained people to manage this process."

And that's the attraction of SafeGuard to organisations such as the Geelong Advertiser, Australian Retailers Association and Regional Air Express. SafeGuard automatically provides a centralised archive of all an organisation's incoming and outgoing emails - without any hardware, software or installation requirements or investment. All correspondence filters through MailGuard's servers and the archiving is undertaken externally.

On a monthly basis, each SafeGuard client receives an encrypted CD or DVD with a copy of every email the organisation has sent or received. "I have peace of mind because I am assured of a secure copy of every email, even if deleted from the user's mailbox or our servers," said McCullagh. "And with email storage having eaten into our network communications storage facilities, SafeGuard has actually assisted us in freeing up disk space for other storage requirements."

McCullagh adds that, "MailGuard provides an extra layer of protection to the organisation. The benefits we receive far outweigh the low cost of setup (virtually nil) and ongoing costs." [Warrnambool Cheese and Butter Factory has implemented MailGuard's virus checking, spam filtering and email archiving services.

The law pushing the need for organisations to archive online correspondence

New regulations, coupled with companies' fears of lawsuits, are pushing the need to archive. For example, the Australian Corporations Law requires financial documents (including emails) to be retained for five years and government departments, (under the Public Records Act) need to retain emails for seven years. The issue is that it's an expensive and complex endeavor. The health care and financial services industries are the two generally considered to be the hardest hit.

"There are a lot of new regulations including the much discussed privacy law and its impact on employers. They dictate the rules for various industries governing what information must be stored away and made accessible," says Nathan Oldfield, IT Manager at Barry & Nilsson Lawyers, who has implemented SafeGuard within his organisation. "I see SafeGuard as a safety net for our 100 users, capturing all correspondence, even those quick one liners, that we tend to delete immediately but which may be such an important source of evidence should there be any legal issues arising."

Johnson adds that the USA experience should be a high incentive for Australian organisations to comply. He cites such examples as:

• In 2003, five Wall Street brokerages agreed to pay US$8.25 million in fines for discarding e-mail related to customer transactions
• In July, a court found that UBS Warburg was responsible for paying as much as US$300,000 to restore e-mails required for a gender discrimination case
• A 2003 study (http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/survey/survey.pdf) by the ePolicy Institute, American Management Association of 1,100 American companies showed that 14 percent of respondents had been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email and, while there is an overwhelming need for companies to archive emails, only 37 percent of organisations have an email archiving policy.

"SafeGuard complies with SEC Rule 17a-4 and NASD 3110 and meets the requirements of the Electronic Transactions Act for reliability and integrity," said Johnson. "With the fear of litigation weighing heavily on businesses today, we make it simple for organisations to meet their compliance requirements." MailGuard is confident that SafeGuard, as an outsourced solution, will appeal to a broad variety of industries.

MailGuard's newly launched mail archiving service also offers its reseller base an additional opportunity for enhanced revenues. For more information and pricing on SafeGuard, call 1300 30 44 30 or go to http://mailguard.com.au/safeguard

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