Jeffers takes key role with Mail Distiller

IAN JEFFERS, the former managing director of NTL Ireland, has taken on the role of chief executive with e-mail filtering firm Mail Distiller.

The four-year-old company was spun out of BT and has developed software that removes spam, viruses and phishing attacks from e-mail. Rather than install the software at customer level, Mail Distiller provides it to companies as a managed service.

Mr Jeffers says the goal is to become the number five globally in e-mail managed services, a market that Gartner currently values at €300 million.

"It's an increasing trend that people want to shift away from a box solution," says Mr Jeffers. "It's on the edge of your network so the spam is still using your bandwidth. You also have to worry about maintaining and managing it."

Mr Jeffers cites figures which show that, globally, spam accounted for 76 per cent of all e-mails in May, with one in 170 of mails containing a virus and one in 265 being a phishing attack.

The service Mr Jeffers's company will offer will be available at prices from €5 per mailbox per month, but he says large corporations with a lot of users will pay less than that. The product is currently sold through a network of partners.

Mail Distiller is backed by Belfast technology investors Crescent Capital, which has provided £1 million (€1.26 million) in backing. The company is currently raising additional funding to develop a platform that could be licensed by partners to filter and archive not just e-mail but instant messaging and other forms of content.

Mail Distiller claims to filter more e-mail than any other provider in Ireland, which would give it a unique real-time insight into spam and other security threats.

The company is currently developing an early warning service for new threats and is in discussion with financial services organisations that want to get instant notification of phishing attacks targeting their customers.

The company provides filtering for 6,000 medical general practitioners in Northern Ireland, a group that presents particular challenges for anti-spam software. "A lot of spam filters stop anything that contains the word Viagra, for instance," says Mr Jeffers.

The company employs "less than a dozen staff" currently and Mr Jeffers expects any future expansion to be in sales and marketing. Mail Distiller is currently looking at expansion into new markets, with the US, Russia and Poland currently under consideration.

"We filter mail in binary code so language is not an obstacle for the business - we can take this anywhere," he says.

Mr Jeffers held a number of positions in London and Belfast with NTL after he left the Irish operation in 2005. He subsequently "went sailing for a year", which included being a crew member in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.