Transparent Filtering

MailChannels Transparent Filtering is carrier-grade software that provides a fully transparent way to block the delivery of spam from your network to the Internet. It is designed to make email abuse management easier for telcos, dedicated and VPS hosting providers.

Transparent Filtering

Analyze outgoing email traffic from your network
to protect IP reputation


MailChannels Transparent Filtering blocks the delivery of spam from your dedicated and VPS hosting customers by transparently intercepting and blocking abusive email before it reaches the internet.

Fully Transparent

MailChannels transparently proxies outgoing email from your network, filtering it and applying an abuse management policy that you define.

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transparent filtering

Analytics

Response Analytics™

Email receivers generate confusing and ever-changing error messages to let you know they don’t like your email. MailChannels understands what these errors mean, and by combining this intelligence with sender behavior analysis, allows you to respond even more quickly to spammers whose message content is so new the filters don’t even recognize it yet.

Read our technical brief

Behavior Analysis

Spammers don’t behave like legitimate users. MailChannels records dozens of minute-by-minute statistics about each email sender in your network, detecting when a sender’s behavior suddenly starts looking “spammy.” MailChannels reviews each sender’s full history before letting a message get delivered, ensuring spammers never get a chance to get established in your network.

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“MailChannels was the obvious choice and we're certainly happy with them”

Peter Holden Photo
Peter Holden
CEO, Hostwinds

Never worry about blacklisting

Analyze all outgoing SMTP traffic from your customer base without configuration changes. You can filter mail coming from servers, subscribers, scripts, and devices to achieve a blacklist-free network.

Download datasheet for more details

Transparent filtering

Transparent filtering

Filter mail from servers, subscribers, scripts, and devices to reduce IP blacklisting
Visibility

Visibility

Search email history with a powerful parametric log index
Compromised account detection

Compromised account detection

Identify and shut down hacked accounts or malicious IP addresses in seconds, before they cause email issues
Scalability and clustering

Scalability and clustering

Handle up to 10,000 servers or 10 million end users on one server
Policy Scripting

Policy Scripting

Write expressive email policies in JavaScript
Reputation protection

Reputation protection

Use intelligent IP address allocation, apply rate limits, and monitor delivery rates
MailChannels Console

Centralized Intelligence

MailChannels Transparent Filtering relieves service providers of the cost and
complexity of managing email abuse and IP address reputation.

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Compatible with Customer Privacy

We’ve retained the best legal counsel in Germany to understand GDPR and how providers can lawfully intercept and filter outgoing spam without infringing on customers’ privacy.

Read our White Paper

Built for Dedicated and
VPS Hosting Providers

Transparent Filtering works in conjunction with your routers. The routers are configured using Policy Based Routing (PBR) to redirect outgoing port 25 traffic from the network to the MailChannels server. With MailChannels Transparent Filtering, you can intercept the outgoing SMTP connections, analyze them, and forward them to the intended destination without modifying the source IP address. The mail will appear to be coming from each individual VPS or dedicated server, and your customers don’t know that their mail is being filtered.

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Email Security Features

Fully Transparent

MailChannels transparently proxies outgoing email from your network, filtering it and applying an abuse management policy that you define. Spam is redirected or quarantined away from the network flow, which improves your IP reputation and reduces the number of support calls related to IP blacklisting. Transparent proxying is the only method that enables detection and blocking of spam from machines you don’t control, such as subscribers PCs and mobile devices, and dedicated and virtual servers.

Behavior Analysis

Spammers don’t behave like legitimate users. MailChannels records dozens of minute-by-minute statistics about each email sender in your network, detecting when a sender’s behavior suddenly starts looking “spammy.” MailChannels reviews each sender’s full history before letting a message get delivered, ensuring spammers never get a chance to get established in your network.

Response Analytics™

Email receivers generate confusing and ever-changing error messages to let you know they don’t like your email. MailChannels understands what these errors mean, and by combining this intelligence with sender behavior analysis, allows you to respond even more quickly to spammers whose message content is so new the filters don’t even recognize it yet.

Integration with external services

Fighting spam at service provider scale is a team effort, requiring tight integration with external data-feeds and services. MailChannels lets you consume external data through native SQL, LDAP, DNS, and web service bindings that are delivered through an intuitive JavaScript policy interface.

Service Provider Features

Carrier-scale software architecture

MailChannels Transparent Filtering was designed with ultra-scale operation in mind. Deployed as a set of interchangeable components, the software scales with your traffic and requirements. Holiday season spam wave approaching? No problem: just add servers and scale with no downtime.

Deployment automation

Containers? Orchestration? Software automation? We’ve got you covered with support for the latest deployment automation technologies, including Docker and Chef.

Multi-user console with auditing

MailChannels supports multiple levels of user access to accommodate the varying needs of system administrators, abuse desk managers, and abuse desk employees. Audit logs track user activity to enable forensic investigation. LDAP enables integration with corporate directories.

RADIUS integration

For ISPs and mobile operators, RADIUS integration enables tracking subscriber email behavior based on RADIUS mapping rather than IP address.

Trusted by leading service providers

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Frequently Asked Questions

Transparent Filtering is carrier-grade software that provides a fully transparent way to block the delivery of spam from your network to the Internet. It is designed to make email abuse management easier for telecoms and dedicated/VPS/cloud hosting providers.

Use Transparent Filtering to analyze all outgoing SMTP traffic from your customer base without configuration changes. You can filter mail coming from servers, subscribers, scripts, and devices and achieve a blacklist-free network.

  • Dedicated Hosting Providers
  • VPS Hosting Providers
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • Internet Service Providers
  • Mobile Operators
  1. Contact sales to discuss your needs with our sales team.
  2. Provision a Linux virtual machine or dedicated hardware.
  3. Follow the Quick Start Guide to install packages (30 minutes).
  4. Start sending traffic.

MailChannels Transparent Filtering requires a server with a minimal 8 CPU cores and 32 GB of RAM. We recommend 16 CPUs and 64 GB RAM for larger volume clients. 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:

  • 8/16 x 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU cores
  • 32/64 GB RAM
  • 1 x 1000BASE-T NIC
  • 1 TB solid-state drive (SSD) for logging and DB compactions (500 GB is suitable for a trial but should be increased to a minimum 1 TB SSD for production load/use)

MailChannels has been certified to run with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6/7 and CentOS 6.x versions. Our packages do require an older version of Java, JDK v1.7.0. Our Operations staff can help with any or all portions of the install if requested, including downgrading and manual installation of JDK 1.7.0 on Ubuntu systems where the packages are no longer in the main repositories.

  1. When we have a high degree of confidence that a message is spam, it is blocked immediately. Messages like it will continue to be blocked until such time as a) a false positive report is provided to us, or b) the message no longer is spam based on feedback from the Internet.
  2. We apply a large range of techniques to select how quickly individual users or scripts are able to send through our system, and whether to enforce a permanent block on a user or script. The exact mechanisms for rate limiting and blocking are ever changing based on machine learning and manual intervention; however, none of the blocking effects are long lasting and all can be adjusted in response to complaints.

Pricing is based on outbound email volume, billed monthly or annually.

Yes, discounts are available in exchange for longer term commitments. Contact sales to learn more.

Software license terms are negotiable and the term can range from monthly all the way up to five years or more depending on your requirements.

Getting Started is Simple

Protect your IP reputation to prevent listings on Spamhaus, SpamCop, Compromised Blocklist (CBL),
UCEPROTECT, SenderBase, and others.

programmer

  1. Contact us to get started
  2. Provision a Linux virtual machine or dedicated server.
  3. Configure your routers for Policy Based Routing.
  4. Set up initial email policies.
  5. Start sending traffic.

Contact Sales