Cupertino, Calif., February 11, 2004 - Proofpoint, Inc., a world-leader in corporate anti-spam solutions, today announced that Kaiser Permanente, a leader in integrated healthcare, has chosen the award winning Proofpoint Protection Server for powerful and flexible messaging security. Tested against many criteria, including spam effectiveness rates, false positives rates, end user flexibility, reliable and scalable architecture, and enterprise reporting, Proofpoint demonstrates its consistent ability to defend mission-critical communications against spam, viruses and other threats.

Faced with the necessity of reducing the growing influx of spam email, the organization will rely on Proofpoint’s advanced technology to block virtually all undesired messages, while ensuring that all valid messages are received by Kaiser’s employees. This is especially critical for Kaiser Permanente, since many anti-spam tools block messages on the basis of words or phrases relevant to healthcare communication such as “teen sex” or “Viagra”. The company needed an anti-spam solution that could fine-tune itself to the specific requirements of the medical community and related email interaction.

Kaiser Permanente also required a robust solution that could be deployed across geographically distributed data centers, while being managed and monitored from a central control location without the need for additional headcount. Proofpoint has enabled it to reduce its day-to-day expense of fighting spammers, through advanced management functions of the Proofpoint Protection Server and automated weekly anti-spam updates provided by the Proofpoint Dynamic Update Service™.

Beyond spam protection, Proofpoint’s integrated Virus Protection and Content Compliance Modules offer complete messaging protection. Powered by Network Associate’s Anti-Virus Engine, the Virus Protection Module blocks virus attacks at company’s gateways while leveraging the flexible Proofpoint administrative console and Dynamic Update Service. Proofpoint’s content compliance capabilities also provide the platform necessary to ensure that email communication is in compliance with internal and external regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“A successful national enterprise such as Kaiser Permanente spends a lot of time managing its communications, both internally and with patients, and thus must dedicate significant resources to choosing and maintaining a messaging protection system,” said Gary Steele, president and CEO of Proofpoint, Inc. “Kaiser Permanente’s trust in Proofpoint to defend their vital email communications against spam, viruses and other concerns points to our leading technology and ability to work with customers to fit their needs. We’re pleased to announce this relationship and provide Kaiser Permanente with the most reliable and easy-to-use solution available.”

The Proofpoint Protection Server is based on proprietary MLX™ technology, the only enterprise messaging protection solution based on advanced machine learning techniques that have proven highly effective at classifying data in many fields of science, such as in genome sequence analysis. MLX:

• Includes machine learning algorithms with predictive capabilities so the Proofpoint Protection Server can detect new mutations of spam immediately;
• Identifies new types of spam and other malicious messages more quickly than traditional anti-spam tools that rely on humans to manually detect spam and encode new rules; and
• Blocks the most spam, with the least number of false positives, by examining over 50,000 email attributes to identify spam (traditional anti-spam tools use 3,000 or fewer attributes).

About Proofpoint, Inc.
Proofpoint provides business software for large enterprises to stop spam, protect against email viruses and ensure compliance with corporate policies and regulations through their messaging infrastructure. The company's flagship product, Proofpoint Protection Server™ is a software breakthrough that employs Proofpoint’s MLX technology, an advanced Machine Learning system developed at Proofpoint’s Anti-spam Laboratory to govern the flow of digital correspondence. Proofpoint was founded by technology visionary and former CTO of Netscape Communications, Eric Hahn. The Cupertino, California-based company is funded by Benchmark Capital, Inventures Group, Mohr, Davidow Ventures, RRE Ventures and Stanford University. For more information, please visit www.proofpoint.com.

MLX is a trademark of Proofpoint Inc. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.