The Company

	When and why was MAPS founded?
	What is MAPS' mission?
	How has the MAPS' strategy evolved?
	What industry standards does MAPS support?
	Who are MAPS' Customers?
	How is MAPS financed?
	How does the expertise of the executive staff ensure MAPS' success?

The Market

	Why is the Spam volume growing so quickly?
	How large is the US and Global Anti-spam Market?
	What is MAPS' position in the market?

The Company

When and why was MAPS founded?

MAPS was founded in late 1996 to pioneer the development of robust anti-spam technology. As the original anti-spam company, MAPS is clearly the industry leader for network layer spam blocking services. The executive team's insight into how companies were grappling with the growing dilemma of spam flowing into and around the Internet led to the creation of the MAPS RBL+^® Master Service.

What is MAPS' mission?

MAPS' mission is to help defend the Internet's email systems from abuse by spammers. MAPS' focus is working with ISPs by delivering tools that enable them to enforce strong anti-spam terms and conditions with their subscribers.

How has the MAPS' strategy evolved?

As the spammer's mail strategies have evolved, MAPS has also evolved its services to include a comprehensive offering that addresses the changing needs of its Enterprise and ISP customers. MAPS was founded with the creation of the very first RBL^® (Realtime Blackhole List), to enable the blocking of IP addresses that spammers were known to utilize. As spammers became more sophisticated and began to hide their identity through the abuse of easy to obtain dial-up accounts and unprotected open mail relays, MAPS responded by offering the DUL^® (Dynamic User List) and RSS^® (Relay Spam Stopper) services. Each new service has allowed our customer base to more easily identify and block sources of spam, resulting in lower bandwidth and IT infrastructure costs, as well as greater end-user productivity.

What industry standards does MAPS support?

MAPS understands the significant investment companies have made in existing mail systems and anti-spam architectures. Unlike many other solutions, MAPS has designed its solutions to be compatible with any filtering or messaging systems already in place. Because our solutions work at the network layer (layer 3), they sit in front of the existing architecture and are seamless with all standard DNS servers, as well as the leading Mail Transport Agents (MTAs) such as Sendmail and Postfix.

Who are MAPS' Customers?

MAPS only began to charge for its services in 2001, and over the last four years has grown its customer base to more than 2000 paying customers. From High Tech and Financial Services to Healthcare and Education, MAPS has evolved its solution to meet the growing need to reduce spam in the global marketplace.

How is MAPS financed?

MAPS is a privately held company based in San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. MAPS is self-funded and recently became profitable.

How does the expertise of the executive staff ensure MAPS' success?

MAPS' executives have formulated the company's vision and guided it successfully through its transition from a non-profit to a rapidly growing paid subscription service. Due to both MAPS' phenomenal success and the white-hot market opportunity, the company has successfully attracted numerous seasoned executives with extensive experience in anti-spam technology, messaging and business solutions. This team continues to propel the company to even greater levels of growth and success.

The Market

Why is the Spam volume growing so quickly?

Studies have shown that spam has been growing exponentially over the past several years. In 2001, spam made up about 8% of the emails sent. That number grew to 36% in 2002 and over 60% by end of 2003. Estimates today show spam to be 80% of all messages being sent and still increasing.

This rapid growth is due in part to improved technology, as well as improved methods for sending spam. As detection methods are improving so are the techniques being used to send spam. It is now just as easy to send 10,000 emails a day as it is to send 10,000,000 emails a day. The result is the incredible growth we are now witnessing in the amount of spam hitting the Internet, our messaging systems and our in-boxes.

How large is the US and Global Anti-spam Market?

The delivery of spam blocking solutions is the fastest growing segment of the $20B billion spam problem as estimated by Ferris Research. The main financial damage that spam causes comes in the form of higher bandwidth costs, additional servers to run anti-spam filtering software and the added storage requirements for holding the spam. Ferris Research also estimates that revenue produced by the spam solution providers totaled $12M in 2003 and will grow to $36M in 2004.

What is MAPS' position in the market?

As the first to market, MAPS is the premier provider of spam blocking systems and has over eight years of experience in delivering world-class solutions. MAPS' unique services are focused on dramatically reducing spam at its source, before it reaches the front door of the messaging system. Our on-demand service model enables our customers to pay for the results they want, rather than paying for software and infrastructure they do not need. MAPS' services seamlessly connect into existing messaging systems and immediately reduce bandwidth and IT infrastructure costs, while recapturing lost end-user productivity.

Our On-Demand Message Defense Services is a key part of our focus on enabling trusted networks that are spam and virus free. While our On-Demand Message Defense services deliver immediate results, our long-term support of the Alliance for Spam Free Networks (ASFN) will create an Internet that is spam free. MAPS' services and partner programs are unique in their approach and technologies used to block spam when compared to others in the industry.