Small and medium-size companies may not be willing, or even qualified, to take such drastic measures. If merely reading through all the various APIs and software packages needed to seal your corporation against viruses is enough to give you a headache, you're a prime candidate for e-mail outsourcing. Indeed, outsourcing can still make financial sense even if you don't have a problem keeping various filtering and scanning software running.

Critical Path, which boasts none of its customers were affected by the Melissa or ILOVEYOU outbreaks, serves not only small businesses but big companies such as CompuServe, ETrade, and Sprint. Its outsourced InScribe Email Messaging starts at $10 per user per month and drops as you add users. Antispam filtering is standard in the base price; antivirus scanning and filtering via the InCase Virus Scanning system carries a surcharge. Critical Path plans to add digital signatures by the second quarter of 2001.

To ensure servers include up-to-the-minute virus protection, Critical Path works closely with Symantec and Brightmail (Web site). Brightmail provides a "mailwall" for ISPs, ASPs, and corporations in its Anti-Virus Solution software, as well as a free antispam service for individual users.

Both Critical Path and Symantec are investors in Brightmail, which in turn works with the SARC and its own Bright mail Logistics and Operations Center to monitor viruses around the world in real time, 24/7. It then uses information about new viruses and malicious mobile code to create rules, which it sends out every 5 minutes to Brightmail servers at Critical Path, your ASP, or the in-house Brightmail server system.

"People think they're protected by their antivirus program because they updated it last week," says Gary Hermansen, Brightmail's CEO. "They're not." Brightmail provides continuous live updates at prices ranging from 50 cents to $4 per mailbox per year, depending on the number of users, the services they've subscribed to, and how much Brightmail handles at its locations vs. how much is handled at the customer's own data center.

In the coming year, we're likely to see a gradual move toward the increased use of encrypted and digitally signed e-mail, such as ZixIt Corp.'s ZixMail system (Web site) or Hilgraeve's HyperSend (Web site), both free to individual users. We'll also see secure e-mail appliances, such as SecureCom Networks' secure mail routers (Web site), which add SSL to SMTP to encrypt and authenticate the sender and receiver.