By: Rick Broida Michigan Observer & Eccentric Newspapers

Michigan may not be Silicon Valley, but you'd be surprised by some of the high-tech solutions coming out of businesses right in your neighborhood. Take Greenview Data, an Ann Arbor company that's helping organizations stop the onslaught of spam.

Greenview's SpamStopsHere is what's known as a server-side solution, meaning it filters out spam before it ever reaches a company's mail servers.  The service actually employs six levels of filtering, which Greenview claims will block 99.5 percent of all spam, without interfering with legitimate e-mail.

Sounds great, right? I was all ready to sign up (especially now that America Online is cruelly shutting down my beloved Mailblocks service - more on that in a future column) until I learned that SpamStopsHere isn't available for individual users. It's strictly a business product.

Bummer! Founder Ted Green, who started Greenview Data back in 1980 (with a then-famous software program called VEDIT), told me that his relatively small shop simply isn't equipped to handle the support needs of a consumer version of SpamStopsHere.

Guess I'll have to find another way to banish spam from my mailbox. But for businesses, SpamStopsHere looks like a killer solution.