Press Release

Perl E-mail Management Software for Sendmail: PerlMx, the Power Tool for Sys Admins Debuts at Linux Showcase

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 12, 2000--ActiveState, the leading provider of Internet programming software and services, announces the release of PerlMx, a tool that enables system administrators to create customized, powerful mail scripts easily. A mail filter engine that operates as a plug-in to Sendmail products, PerlMx provides for rapid prototyping, debugging, and deployment of custom e-mail filtering solutions. PerlMx is implemented at the server level, is extensible, scalable, and currently runs on Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.

PerlMx combines the speed and robustness of Perl, the most popular Internet programming language, with sendmail, the de facto standard Internet Mail server responsible for moving the majority of all Internet Mail. PerlMx readily integrates with the Content Filter API available in Sendmail Switch 2.1. This latest product offering from Sendmail provides administrators an unprecedented level of control over their Internet backbone with features such as administrator alerts, attachment filtering, and subject line filtering. PerlMx's persistent run time allows real time processing of every SMTP transaction received by Sendmail. Unlike other e-mail management products, the PerlMx approach enables system administrators to write customized scripts to immediately reject messages based on size, content, sender or recipient.

``We're delighted to bring the power, quickness and reliability of Perl to the millions of sendmail users,'' said Dick Hardt, founder & CEO, ActiveState. ``Given the business necessity of e-mail communication, PerlMx will prove invaluable for administrators who are now able to write a filter in five minutes to block viruses and spam at the server level before they hit a user's inbox.''

Business communication over the Internet is predicted to increase exponentially in the near future. Indicative of this Forrester Research forecasts that ``permitted'' commercial e-mail messages will grow from three billion today to 250 billion by 2002. With the average number of commercial e-mail messages that U.S. online consumers receiving annually rising from 40 last year to more than 1,600 by 2005, according to Jupiter Communications.

``Perl is a natural choice for manipulating e-mail given its recognized strength in text processing,'' said Greg Olson, co-founder and EVP Business Development, Sendmail, Inc. ``ActiveState's PerlMx is a revolutionary new approach to e-mail management that provides rapid design, development, and deployment of reliable e-mail filters to serve the unique content management needs of enterprises.''

PerlMx provides:

• Mail Archiving: selectively log e-mail traffic based on arbitrary criteria
• Volume Accounting: keep track of e-mail volumes to generate statistics
• Custom Routing: redirect mail to third parties based on sender, recipient or other external parameters
• Spam Control: implement your own heuristics for weeding out ``spam'' e-mail
• Keyword Scanning: add custom actions based on keywords in e-mail
• Content Rewriting: add new headers or change existing content of to incoming messages

``PerlMx brings professional server-side e-mail content management to the real world. Whether you're an ISP that wants to keep track of e-mail bandwidth consumed by users, or a large corporation that must implement evolving e-mail content policies, PerlMx will help you create the custom solution that not only fits your needs, but grows with them,'' said Gurusamy Sarathy, PerlMx Project Lead, ActiveState.

``PerlMx is a great way of incorporating the text and database processing power of Perl into Sendmail,'' said Jim Baker, Chief Technology Officer, Empact Solutions. ``Often the incoming mail processing requirements for businesses who do high volume e-mail processing can be overwhelming, PerlMx offers a way to address those problems quickly while easily customizing the solution.''

PerlMx is free for educational and personal use. It is $495 US per processor for commercial use. OEM versions are also available.

About ActiveState

ActiveState is at the forefront of open source infrastructure software, providing Internet programming products and services for all popular operating systems including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. ActiveState's key technology platforms are Perl, the Internet's most popular programming language and Python, a user-friendly scripting language. ActiveState solutions provide enterprise-wide deployment of Perl and Python, improved programmer productivity, and seamless integration with other technologies. ActiveState believes in the evolution of core Perl and Python technologies and is committed to broadening the appeal of Perl and Python by making available easy to install packages for popular operating systems. For more information visit www.ActiveState.com.

About Sendmail, Inc.

Sendmail, Inc. provides mission-critical Internet messaging solutions to corporations and service providers. As the primary source of commercial software based on sendmail, the de facto standard Internet Mail server, Sendmail, Inc. leads the development of Internet Mail standards and ensures their early implementation in its commercial and Open Source products. The company is headquartered in Emeryville, Calif., with offices in the UK, Germany and France, and distributors in Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information on Sendmail, Inc., visit its Web site at www.Sendmail.com.

Note to Editors: ActiveState and PerlMx are trademarks of ActiveState Tool Corp. All other company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

     ActiveState
     Lori Pike, 604/484-6417
     LoriP@ActiveState.com
       or
     Sendmail, Inc.
     Barbel French, 510/594-5495
     publicrelations@sendmail.com