Spam, once the scourge strictly of consumer E-mail accounts, continues to be a growing problem for corporate E-mail administrators, but a Canadian vendor says it has the answer.

Vircom Inc., a Montreal provider of E-mail servers equipped with spam and virus filters for ISPs, Thursday unveiled a family of messaging gateway software products designed to fight spam and viruses entering corporate E-mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Novell GroupWise. Vircom's VOP modusGate integrates an antivirus engine from Norman Data Defense Systems with a Windows-based gateway that's user aware--meaning it can tell whether the recipient of a message is still employed by the company. If the system detects that the employee is no longer on the company mail server, VOP modusGate rejects the message altogether.

Vircom's user awareness represents a unique approach to eliminating a healthy chunk of E-mail traffic from corporate networks, Aberdeen Group analyst Dana Gardner says. Gardner says a surprisingly large number of companies have E-mail address books that are many times larger than their employee rosters. As a result, chunks of their network bandwidth are being wasted transporting wayward messages.

Unfortunately, Gardner says, it's unlikely that companies can get a complete handle on spam because of the proliferation of E-mail lists that grow as employees respond to unsolicited messages or enter their E-mail addresses while registering on Web sites. "There's no such thing as an ironclad spam filter," he says. "The only way to not get spam is to stop getting E-mail."