MailChannels Makes the Most of HostingCon

by Liam Eagle
Web Host Industry Review blog
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Putting the lid on spam

by David Pye
Globe and Mail: Print Edition
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SearchSecurity.com: Small email security vendors thrive in saturated market

By Robert Westervelt, News Editor
11 Jun 2008 | SearchSecurity.com

Spam almost brought the servers of AlaWeb Pioneer Services to a grinding halt, according to Hugh Messenger, senior network administrator at AlaWeb. The ISP, serving business and residential customers in Alabama and Florida, was flooded with thousands of connections, slowing customer messages and even blocking some legitimate inbound messages.

We're tracking 18 major vendors that make up 90% of the market.
Peter Firstbrook,
research director, Gartner Inc.

"We probably never got more than 200,000 genuine emails a day," Messenger said. "We went from processing that to processing 2 to 3 million spam messages a day."

Companies like AlaWeb are using specialty vendors to reduce spam and control targeted phishing attacks, but industry analysts say larger vendors with more feature sets will dominate the email security market. Buying trends are consolidating around the biggest vendors, but some specialty vendors are surviving.

"We're tracking 18 major vendors that make up 90% of the market," said Peter Firstbrook, a research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. "It's a saturated market right now."

The highly competitive market is taking a toll on some vendors. Redwood City, Calif.-based Tumbleweed expanded its email security products in 2004 with email firewall, antispam and antivirus appliances. Last week, Axway, an EDI network-based managed file transfer software vendor, announced a merger with Tumbleweed. Firstbrook said Tumbleweed had been steadily losing market share.

Joe Fisher, Tumbleweed's executive vice president of product management, called the market commoditized, and said Tumbleweed changed its strategy to focus on outbound email encryption and managed file transfers.

Functionality, such as data leakage prevention, encryption, antispam, antivirus, and email routing and management are converging to an appliance or services based platform, Firstbrook said.

Small and midsize businesses are turning toward managed services to handle email security. It's a market led by Cisco Systems, Google-Postini, Symantec, Trend Micro, MessageLabs and Microsoft, according to Gartner's Firstbrook.

MailChannels Corp., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is one player that found a niche in the antispam market. AlaWeb is using MailChannels' Traffic Control software to create a reputation score and slow low-scoring connections during email processing to turn away spammers. MailChannels recently added support of Apache SpamAssassin for Traffic Control users. The company says Traffic Control filters out about 85% of spam, reducing load handling issues. MailChannels is making Traffic Control available for free for low-volume use, less than 10,000 connections a day.

Michael D. Osterman, president and principal analyst of Osterman Research Inc. said a number of vendors offer reputation systems, including IronPort, Commtouch and Secure Computing.

"By blocking most of the traffic before it reaches the corporate network, CPU cycles are saved since blocking based on reputation is much less CPU-intensive than content filtering," Osterman said.

AlaWeb's Messenger said there is some fine tuning that needs to be done to Traffic Control to eliminate false positives. AlaWeb typically places a few users each day on a white list so their messages get through the filter, he said.

"The beauty of a product like Traffic Control is that it can be easily installed and act like a proxy to eliminate a large number of spam toting inbound connections," Messenger said.

When a spammer attempts to connect from a server to send unwanted email, the throttler lets them connect at a slow speed, keeping data flowing at only a few bytes a second. Spamming software senses the slow connection and closes it to find another ISP to serve up the messages.

Like other niche players in the email security market, MailChannels' technology could be acquired by a larger vendor, Osterman said.

"They have good technology," he said. "It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft buy them, for example, although I have not heard anything along those lines."

MailChannels' Financial Support Helps Apache SpamAssassin Community by Enabling More Scalable "Honey Pots"

Putting spam traps onto Amazon EC2 will help boost the accuracy of SpamAssassin rules

Vancouver, Canada (PRWEB) June 5, 2008 -- MailChannels Corporation, the global leader in email traffic shaping software, today announced that it is paying for infrastructure to host the Apache SpamAssassin project's spam honey pots. Support of this project enables the Apache SpamAssassin project to increase the number of honey pots it hosts, leading to better and more timely data on global spam outbreaks.

"We're grateful for MailChannels' continued support of the SpamAssassin project," said Justin Mason, Chairman of the Apache SpamAssassin Project Management Committee. "Forward-thinking companies like MailChannels are proving that through collaboration and community involvement, SpamAssassin can continue to provide world-class spam filtering for organizations of all sizes. The Apache SpamAssassin honey pots provide a test-bed for spam filter rules that serve an estimated 100 million SpamAssassin users worldwide."

We're grateful for MailChannels' continued support of the SpamAssassin project
Honey pots have long proven a vital part of an effective spam defense, but operating them at sufficient scale can be expensive and time consuming. In his role as a member of the Apache SpamAssassin Management Committee, Mason had been planning for some time to move the SpamAssassin honey pots into Amazon's flexible EC2 hosting environment. MailChannels support allowed the project to make the move.

MailChannels and Mason found an opportunity to help each other. In return for paying the hosting costs, the company will be able to share in the live data generated to provide a realistic test-bed for its new anti-spam technologies.

The support of the honey pots is the latest example of MailChannels' strong belief that SpamAssassin can provide a highly-effective foundation for enterprise spam defenses. MailChannels is committed to supporting open source projects with technical and financial assistance, and with add-on proprietary products that enhance the functionality of the open source platforms.

MailChannels recently announced a commercial-grade, proprietary email traffic shaping solution for SpamAssassin that enables enterprise IT to dramatically improve the effectiveness of SpamAssassin. More information on the new solution can be found at http://www.mailchannels.com

About Apache SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a mature, widely-deployed open source project that serves as a mail filter to identify spam. SpamAssassin uses a variety of mechanisms including header and text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases. SpamAssassin runs on a server, and filters spam before it reaches your mailbox. Read more about it at http://spamassassin.apache.org.

About the Apache Software Foundation
SpamAssassin is an Apache Software Foundation project and is released under the Apache License. The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. As a US 501(c)(3) public charity, the Foundation provides an established framework for contributions of both intellectual property and funding for the support of open source software development. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products for the public benefit, attracting large communities of users and enabling future innovation, both commercial and individual, through its pragmatic Apache License.
Read more about it at http://www.apache.org.

About MailChannels
MailChannels Corporation is the global leader in email traffic shaping software, providing the most effective protocol-layer spam filtering to email receivers of all sizes. The company's flagship product, Traffic Control, combines an ultra efficient multiplexing SMTP proxy with real-time reputation data to prioritize email traffic before it hits the mail server. MailChannels Traffic Control protects email users at Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers, and universities worldwide. Recognized by the MIT Spam Conference and other leading authorities on spam, MailChannels is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.
For more information, call (604) 685-7488, email info @ mailchannels.com, or visit www.mailchannels.com.

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Contact:
Desmond Liao
MailChannels Corporation
(604) 685-7488
communications@mailchannels.com

Network World: Popular open source spam filter gets boost

New tool from SpamAssassin slows down the transmission of spam into corporate e-mail systems
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Senior Editor, Enterprise Applications
19 May 2008 | IDG News Service


SpamAssassin, popular open source spam-filtering software, will have deadlier aim thanks to an add-on tool that is being offered free of charge to small businesses and individuals by MailChannels.


The tool -- called Traffic Control 3 -- is an e-mail traffic-shaping package that slows down the transmission of spam into corporate e-mail systems. MailChannels officials say Traffic Control 3 will reduce spam volumes by 50 percent to 75 percent for SpamAssassin users.

"Our technology is a software package that slows down spam from suspicious sources like spam bots,'' says Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels. "Our research shows that 90 percent of spammers will give up before delivering spam if the data rate of the connection is slowed down.''

With less spam entering their networks, companies will need fewer mail servers to process or store e-mail for their end users.

MailChannels has sold Traffic Control 3 to enterprise customers such as Pacific Gas & Electric, Cornell University, and Wyeth for two years. Now MailChannels is offering a low-end version of its software to small businesses and individuals that use SpamAssassin.

Traffic control 3 for SpamAssassin is available today.

"E-mail traffic shaping is a technique used by many of the world's largest e-mail receivers,'' Simpson said. "We're trying to make this technology available to everyone.''

More than 150,000 Web sites use SpamAssassin to filter their e-mail traffic, Simpson says.

"SpamAssassin supports hundreds of millions of users. But SpamAssassin is limited because it is just a content filter,'' he adds.

Simpson says MailChannels is giving the open source community access to its Traffic Control 3 software to spread the word of how well the software works and to get feedback from users.

"We know our stuff works, but the only way we have to show that was to put it out there,'' Simpson says. "When you feed the open source community, the investment comes back and pays dividends.''

One customer very pleased with Traffic Control 3 is AlaWeb Pioneer Services, a small, rural ISP that operates in Alabama and Florida. AlaWeb supports 10,000 mailboxes and several hundred domains using Sendmail as its mail transfer agent software.

AlaWeb began using MailChannel's Traffic Control software in front of Sendmail to filter all of its incoming mail in 2005 when its spam volume went through the roof.

"Yesterday, we got 7.5 million spam, of which we filtered over 99 percent,'' says Hugh Messenger, senior network administrator for AlaWeb. "Traffic Control inserts itself between the heavy-lifting, mail-processing software and the client trying to contact you. It weeds out a huge amount of the spam with very simple, very quick techniques, the primary one being that it throttles down the speed of the connection. ... Within 15 to 20 seconds, about 90 percent of the real spammerswill have disconnected and gone away. Just the simple act of tar-pitting gets rid of a huge amount of spam in a very small, lightweight process.''

Messenger says Traffic Control helps him reduce the number of mail servers he needs to support his customers.

"Before MailChannels, when I was just running Sendmail, I could support tops about 100 inbound connections per machine. Since I put in Traffic Control, I can support 2,500 to 3,000 connections,'' he says. `"I don't even know how many machines I'd need if I didn't have MailChannels.''

MailChannels Announces First Commercial-Grade Email Traffic Shaping for SpamAssassin Users

New Software Add-On Improves SpamAssassin Effectiveness by 85 Percent

VANCOUVER, Canada - May 19, 2008 - MailChannels Corporation, the global leader in email traffic shaping software, today announced that Apache SpamAssassin users can now download Traffic Control to dramatically enhance the performance of SpamAssassin. Traffic Control uses email traffic shaping to reduce spam by 85 percent more than blacklisting while delivering a 50 to 100-fold improvement in peak load handling. With this release, SpamAssassin users can join leading universities, service providers, and Fortune 500 companies, who have benefited from Traffic Control’s ability to provide a more reliable and cost effective email service.

Traffic Control 3 for SpamAssassin is available at http://mailchannels.com/download. Commercial use requires a license. A 30-day evaluation is provided free of charge.

“Traffic Control for SpamAssassin is an effective add-on that Apache SpamAssassin administrators large and small should evaluate,” said Justin Mason, author of SpamAssassin. “It is clear that there is no perfect defense to spam, and while SpamAssassin provides a level of protection, it can be resource-intensive. Traffic Control for SpamAssassin provides comprehensive coverage of a wide spectrum of spam and other threats, while delivering major scalability benefits.”

Despite the improving accuracy of SpamAssassin, email administrators still struggle to keep up with the continuous onslaught of new spam outbreaks. Spammers respond to better filter accuracy by increasing the volume of spam that they send. Since spam volume is unpredictable, periodic outbreaks overwhelm email systems causing delivery delays and allowing unacceptable amounts of spam to pass into end user inboxes. SpamAssassin is a great spam filter, but like other spam filters it needs to be paired with an effective protocol-layer defense.

Ongoing analysis of customer data by MailChannels shows that 85 percent of spammers abort email delivery when they are connected to a server that severely restricts their bandwidth. Traffic Control exploits this characteristic spammer behavior and others to deflect a significant portion of spam “in flight” before it hits the spam filter or mail server. High spam traffic impacts overall email by creating email delivery delays. After deploying Traffic Control, SpamAssassin users that are experiencing slow times to process messages will see a dramatic drop in email connection traffic.

About MailChannels

MailChannels Corporation is the global leader in email traffic shaping software, providing the most effective protocol-layer spam filtering to email receivers of all sizes. The company’s flagship product, Traffic Control, combines an ultra efficient multiplexing SMTP proxy with real-time reputation data to prioritize email traffic before it hits the mail server. MailChannels Traffic Control protects email users at Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers, and universities worldwide. Recognized by the MIT Spam Conference and other leading authorities on spam, MailChannels is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

For more information, call (604) 685-7488

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Contacts:
Dave McKee, Steve Marquis
Schwartz Communications, Inc.
(781) 684-0700
MailChannels@schwartz-pr.com

MailChannels in March Issue (pdf) of Virus Bulletin

Ken Simpson, How Inbound Traffic Control Improves Spam Filtering, March 2008, Virus Bulletin. Copyright is held by Virus Bulletin Ltd, but is made available on this site for personal use free of charge by permission of Virus Bulletin.

MailChannels Joins MAAWG

MailChannels is pleased to announce that it has joined the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), a global organization focusing on preserving electronic messaging from online exploits and abuse with the goal of enhancing user trust and confidence, while ensuring the deliverability of legitimate messages. Join MailChannels CEO, Ken Simpson, at the next MAAWG conference in San Francisco, February 18 - 20, 2008.

Exchange and Email Spam Control with Connection Management (webcast)

Watch the on demand webcast of MailChannels CEO, Ken Simpson as he speaks with messaging analyst Osterman Research about why conventional spam-blocking techniques are ineffective against today's spam tactics.

MailChannels Launches New Blog Dedicated to Anti-Spam
The new blog is poised to cut through the clutter surrounding email security issues and deliver timely information on emerging spammer tactics. Subscribe to the RSS feed here.