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Commtouch Anti-Spam Wins Marquee Accounts in Higher Education Market

Commtouch teams up with VARS, resellers, system integrators to focus on expanding sales to higher education and K-12 schools

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 9, 2004--

It's academic. Commtouch(R) (Nasdaq:CTCH), innovator of anti-spam solutions featuring Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD)(TM) technology, announced today that the company is winning deals from higher education institutions globally. Proving its value within colleges and universities in North America, Europe and Asia, the company is leveraging this success and intensifying its efforts this summer to capture sales in K-12 schools, announcing it is using its current channel partners as well as reaching out to value-added resellers (VARs), resellers and systems integrators (SIs) to work closely with Commtouch to initiate evaluations of anti-spam solutions powered by Commtouch at K-12 schools throughout the nation.
Schools -- from kindergarten through high school -- as well as universities are more open and less restrictive than corporations in terms of policies pertaining to email sending and receiving protocol, commented Commtouch CEO Gideon Mantel. "In K-12 schools and universities, email addresses are readily listed on web sites and this attracts spammers who see live email boxes they can fill with spam. Also, in many academic environments students using the Internet are not supervised when they are surfing and may be solicited to provide their email addresses in response to offers they encounter online," said Mantel. "So for the organizations wanting to stop spam and that can't rely on content-based anti-spam solutions that look at the content of the subject header and body of the email and are vulnerable to spammer tricks, Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection technology has a clear advantage in that it identifies and blocks all forms of spam sent en masse. The advantage our RPD technology represents has resulted in Commtouch winning a growing number of deals in recent months."

Mantel noted that Commtouch is in the process of working intensively with resellers, VARs and systems integrators on a program to initiate numerous installations at K-12 schools and universities within the next six months.

"Internally here at Southland Technology we have been using the Commtouch Anti-Spam product for months, and we have seen tremendous results with Commtouch's Recurrent Pattern Detection technology," said Chris Sellman, vice president at Southland Technology, which provides IT solutions to Fortune 1000, small and medium size enterprises, and education and government markets. "We have a major focus in the K-12 market up through higher education, and have had strong success in positioning Commtouch in these accounts."

Meanwhile, Commtouch today reported that the following organizations have recently selected Commtouch Anti-Spam to detect and block spam: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass.; Southwest University in Los Angeles, Calif.; University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, Calif.; University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif.

"Commtouch's Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) impressed us as a particularly effective anti-spam solution," said Douglas Olander, IT Administrator for MIT's Office of The Treasurer. "When it came to detecting spam, various content filter solutions fell short in comparison to RPD in performance and reliability. Additionally, Commtouch's real-time detection feature also impressed us as leading edge."

Commented Richard Waters, IT systems engineer at the University of Utah: "Commtouch's Anti-Spam solution does an outstanding job of detecting and blocking all forms of spam and makes it easy for a network administrator to quickly get the solution up and running without taxing human resources and requiring additional IT infrastructure. An email user is not forced to change his or her behavior whatsoever to enjoy a consistent spam-free email box."

Commtouch's earning praise from higher education institutions comes on the heels of a recent IDC White Paper reviewing spam trends and currently used anti-spam technology, such as honey-pot signatures, lexical and heuristic content analysis, Bayesian filtering, and sender authentication. The IDC White Paper advises that when choosing anti-spam technology, consideration should be given to innovative approaches such as RPD that proactively scrutinize the Internet to detect spam based on characteristics that spammers cannot easily change.

"Anti-spam solutions that offer less than 97 percent detection rate performance are not going to 'make the grade' in corporate environments, university settings, and K-12 schools," said Commtouch CEO Gideon Mantel. "It's gratifying to us that Commtouch's Recurrent Pattern Detection is being recognized by a number of higher education institutions as a smart and winning approach to fighting spam."

About Commtouch

Commtouch Software Ltd. is a global developer and provider of proprietary anti-spam solutions featuring Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) (TM) technology. Its mission is to protect and preserve the integrity of the world's most important communications tool -- email. The company's core technologies reflect its 13 years of experience as a leading vendor of email software applications and provider of global messaging services. Commtouch's patent-pending technologies are employed in solutions that are sold through channels and resellers. In addition, Commtouch anti-spam technologies are incorporated in software applications of security and messaging OEMs. Commtouch is headquartered in Netanya, Israel and its subsidiary, Commtouch Inc., is based in Mountain View, CA. The company was founded in 1991 and has been publicly traded since 1999 (Nasdaq:CTCH - News). To learn more about Commtouch visit www.commtouch.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including projections about our business, within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. For example, statements in the future tense, and statements including words such as "expect", "plan", "estimate", anticipate", or "believe" are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on information available to us at the time of the release; we assume no obligation to update any of them. The statements in this release are not guarantees of future performance and actual results could differ materially from our current expectations as a result of numerous factors, including business conditions and growth or deterioration in the Internet market, commerce and the general economy both domestic as well as international; fewer than expected new-partner relationships; competitive factors including pricing pressures; technological developments, and products offered by competitors; availability of qualified staff for expansion; and technological difficulties and resource constraints encountered in developing new products as well as those risks described in the company's Annual Reports on Form 20-F and reports on Form 6-K, which are available through www.sec.gov.

Recurrent Pattern Detection is a trademark and Commtouch is a registered trademark of Commtouch Software Ltd.

Contacts


Krems Public Relations for Commtouch
Michael Krems, 800-860-6008 or 650-759-7133
krems@kremspr.com

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