• 1999

Company Description

MessageLabs offers email security and management services to guard businesses against email threats, blackmail campaigns and others.

MessageLabs, now part of [Symantec](/organization/symantec) and known as Symantec.cloud, was founded in 1999 with a single purpose — to find a better way to stop the new breed of viruses that were harnessing the power of Internet to spread rapidly and causing huge disruption to the business world. Traditional anti-virus software was designed in a pre-Internet age. Reactive in nature it was proving to be ineffective at stopping this new breed of viruses. Every threat should be stopped long before it reaches you. MessageLabs was the first company in the world to introduce anti-virus as a service rather than software, delivered within the fabric of the Internet, that was able to stop threats long before they reached their intended targets, could learn from the huge volumes of messages being processed and was able to draw on far greater resources than would be possible within a single organization. The result was a truly revolutionary anti-virus service that gained worldwide recognition for stopping and naming the Lovebug virus hours before any other vendor heralding a new era in the industry. MessageLabs has built on this successful model and extended our vision to provide complete certainty in the exchange of all business information, regardless of protocol, device or location. The company continues to innovate as messaging evolves — now with some 19 patents granted or pending.