FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 25 June 2004

JB HI-FI becomes MailGuard's 600th customer

MailGuard opens Sydney office

MailGuard, Australia's first and leading provider of outsourced email anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering and email storage solutions for the SME market, has announced that JB HI-FI has become the company's 600th customer.

"This major milestone attests to the widespread customer acceptance of MailGuard's first line of defence solutions throughout Australia and beyond," said Director of Marketing, Andrew Johnson. "The fact that JB HI-FI has chosen MailGuard to service its email security needs nationally is very gratifying and endorses our commitment to the provision of the highest level of outsourced email security at an attractive price point for business."

The company opened its Sydney office on 21 June. Today, MailGuard is filtering over 500,000 emails daily. Companies across multiple industry segments have adopted MailGuard's services as a means to dramatically simplify management, protect against spam, viruses and unwanted emails in order to provide enhanced messaging capabilities.

"With email increasingly a mission-critical application for our day-to-day business activity, security management of our incoming and outgoing email was a major concern to us," said Geoff Craig, JB HI-FI IT Manager. "But it had to be an external solution that proactively and continuously managed all of the company's email correspondence. We're a small IT team and I cannot afford to have one of my guys virtually spending their entire time looking after email security issues."

Craig maintains that the MailGuard solution proved to be a cost saving to his organisation - which prides itself on being a lean working machine, keeping costs down in order to pass on any possible savings to customers at any of its 32 stores. The company has one simple philosophy - to deliver a specialist range of Hi-Fi and recorded music at Australia's lowest prices.

After an initial pilot, JB HI-FI implemented MailGuard to filter all email passing through or leaving any of its stores or head office. The implementation took one and a half hours without any disruption to the network.

Within the first month, staff productivity levels rose due to the fact that spam has virtually disappeared and Craig's team can turn off or on what the users are able to receive via email. Further benefits include the fact that Craig can access the JB HI-FI email activity status and statistics remotely through the web-enabled portal and that substantial processing time has been freed up from his mail server.

Founded in 2001, MailGuard has seen demand for its services increase as businesses seek secure, service-oriented and easy-to-manage solutions for their email networks. The company has experienced consistent year-over-year revenue growth since its inception. During a time when other technology companies have struggled to maintain business viability, MailGuard has continued its successful expansion while meeting - and exceeding - sales and market share goals.

"MailGuard has built a solid foundation of customers by focusing on three core tenets: service delivery, security and simplicity," said Johnson. "Given tight IT budgets, increased concerns around email security and pressures to make past IT investments deliver on promised ROI, we are confident that companies will continue to be drawn to our outsourced email solutions to secure message networks against spam and virus attacks, as well as enforce policies and route messages."

Currently, JB HI-FI is also trialing MailGuard's outsourced business email archival solution. MailGuard launched SafeGuard® in March and today has 30 customers using the service. Johnson predicts that, by the end of June, more than 100 businesses will have implemented SafeGuard. "The momentum has taken us by surprise," said Johnson. "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. The awareness and understanding of the importance of storing email data has really hit the business world."

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Issued by Rivers of Communication
On behalf of MailGuard

Media enquiries
Craig McDonald, Director of Strategy, MailGuard, tel: +61 3 9694 4444
Dolores Diez, Rivers of Communication, tel: +61 3 9572 4552 / 0417 330 881
email: dolores@riversofcom.com