Chemical firm BASF has signed a contract with IT firm Postini to manage email security across Europe.

Postini is now managing email security across Europe and protecting more than 60,000 BASF employees from spam, email viruses and related spyware.

The chemicals firm which operates in 170 countries decided to appoint the IT security firm to filter emails after witnessing a massive increase in email. Postini is already processing 370,000 messages a day or, on average, 11 million a month.

The increase in spam occured after BASF decided to consolidate multiple internet email domains into a standardised format across the globe.

'We expected that the simpler global email address would significantly increase the probability of spam and virus attacks in all of our regions, so we wanted to proactively address the business risk by blocking spam and viruses even before they entered our company’s email servers,' said Brigitte Buchsrucker, senior specialist of IS architecture at BASF.

Since switching to the Postini service several months ago the chemicals firm has also managed to block more computer viruses.

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