Features
Defend against outbound spam abuse and blacklisting.
User accounts are often stolen and used for sending spam – your IP reputation can be harmed and email from legitimate users slowed down or rejected.
MailChannels automatically detects and blocks compromised subscriber accounts and alerts you so action can be taken.
Transparent Filtering
MailChannels intercepts outbound port 25 connections from email clients and implements behavior-based policies based on 10 years of leading experience preventing spam. These policies are proprietary, highly sophisticated and continually updated to stay one step ahead of spammer ingenuity. Once filtered, clean email is sent to the Internet using the IP address of the client, and spam is blocked.
Policy Violation Alerts
Compromised accounts are detected within seconds, and alerts are sent from MailChannels immediately so you can take action.
Sender Reputation Tracking
Powerful reporting tools make tracking individual sender reputations and behaviour easily workable.
IP Address Re-mapping
The impact of spamming activity is easily isolated by temporarily sending customer email from different IPs. Good users see continuity of service while suspicious users are shut down.
Message Quarantine
Spam messages are held in temporary storage for review. Messages can be released with a single click from the Console by support staff.
Filtering Technology
In addition to behaviour analysis, MailChannels integrates content filtering technology from leading vendors including Cisco, Cloudmark, Commtouch, Eleven, Vade Retro, and others. Swap between filters or use multiple filters in parallel to find the best results.
Carrier Scalability
Save on hardware and rack space. MailChannels scales better than any solution on the market, delivering 30 million messages per hour on each server, and handling more than 1 million concurrent SMTP connections. And it does this 15 times faster than the leading security appliance running on one tenth of the hardware.
Easy system administration all in one place.
MailChannels provides a powerful, point and click, centralized web interface to manage message delivery policy and analyze email traffic.
Rich Reporting, Instantly
100’s of standard reports can be generated with just a couple of clicks – plus, a click and drag tool lets you change the time horizon. These and other tools let you quickly understand overall trends or drill down to individual users and IP addresses.
Search Email Logs
Terabytes of email delivery logs are searchable in seconds so you can diagnose customer issues. Easily find; the time of the SMTP session, the identity of the sender, the list of recipients, the MailChannels server that handled the SMTP session, and a summary of the result of the session, and more.
Create Custom Policies
Create threshold policies and capture complex policies using scripts and lists. Policies can easily be applied to different phases of the SMTP conversation.
Add Counters in Seconds
Keep track of dozens of event types over time and maintain event counters across the cluster, in real-time. Plus you can create new counters to track anything.
Manage Mail Queues
Search for queued messages and peek at message contents, then bounce or delete queued messages with a single click. Or you can batch operations to speed up queue remediation.
Set up Alerts
Set up alerts right from the policy interface and receive notifications when events threaten your clients’ mail stream. Plus, configuring organizations and users can be done by IP address or subnet while administration tasks can be delegated across three levels of access.
Simple server setup and configuration.
30-Minute Deployment
MailChannels can be installed and ready for use within 30 minutes. Installation can be usually done by an administrator, but the assistance of a MailChannels engineer is available. Either over the phone or by granting remote access, there's no extra charge for the help - and Professional Services are absolutely not required.
Hot-swappable Content Filters
With a comprehensive message transport platform, MailChannels makes it easy to add or switch content filters to find the best results. You're no longer dependent on a single source of technology. You can even work with up to 5 content filters in parallel for a truly best-of-breed experience.
Compatibility
Flexible enough to work in all email message environments. MailChannels operates at the application layer so it's compatible with most major routers right out of the box.
RADIUS (AAA) Support
For ISPs using RADIUS to manage IP address allocation, MailChannels can use RADIUS updates to track users as they hop from IP address to IP address in a dynamic IP address space. And by tracking users by account ID rather than IP address, we can prevent abuse from compromised accounts more effectively.
Cost Effective
MailChannels lets you powerfully eliminate outbound spam – with very efficient software and a small investment in hardware. Call us today and find out about our flexible pricing options, pay only for what you use!
Functionality
MailChannels offers a truly automated system for Compromised Account Detection and Outbound Spam Prevention, allowing you to ensure your outbound mail traffic is safe.
To use MailChannels, you simply:- Prepare a server with 8 x 64-bit CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB disk space (for logs), and Ubuntu Linux 11.10 Server “out of the box.”
- Pull packages from the MailChannels software repositories, and run the installer.
- Configure network routers using Policy Based Routing (PBR) to direct all SMTP port 25 traffic from the subscriber network to be protected by the MailChannels machine.
- Set up at least one IP Address Remapping pool for suspicious senders to protect the primary customer IP address space.
- Start the web-based MailChannels Console then create an administrator username and password.
Your system is now ready for use. Pay only for the volume of traffic that was secured.
How It Works
Transparent Filtering
MailChannels intercepts outbound port 25 connections from email clients, removes the spam and implements behavior-based policies, sending clean email to the Internet using the IP address of the client.
SMTP AUTH and SSL/TLS continue to work; users have no idea their email is being filtered, and email clients like Microsoft Outlook work as normal.
Start by flowing a single /24 subnet through the MailChannels server. Run in “tag only” mode to see what the system could do. When you’re confident everything is working just right, flip a switch and start blocking spam.
There’s a centralized web GUI for administration and reporting so you get more visibility into your mail stream.
System Requirements
MailChannels will protect all of your SMTP traffic on one server. We recommend using a server with eight processor cores and 16GB of RAM. The following configuration will process at least 30 million messages per hour, with connection bursts greater than 10,000 SMTP connections per second and concurrency handling exceeding one million concurrent SMTP sessions:
- 8 x 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU cores
- 16 GB RAM
- 1 x 1000BASE-T NIC
- 500 GB disk space (for logs)
MailChannels is only available for Linux kernel 2.6.32 and higher, and is certified to work with Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS.