One of the benefits of speaking at the ITEC shows this fall was getting to
know David Troup, CEO of MailFoundry. Troup built several technology
businesses in that hotbed of advanced technology, Green Bay Wisconsin. Or, as
Troup says with a smile, "the Silicon Tundra."
You can see my interview with Troup here. But let me focus on his MailFoundry product first.
There are no shortage of spam control products, ranging from software to hardware
and all points in between and beyond. MailFoundry sells an appliance starting
at $1,299 in a 1U rack server case (larger models bump up to 2U). There are
six different strength levels based on the number of e-mail messages received.
They also offer a hosted version, and free filtering to companies with 10 or
fewer mailboxes (in support of other small businesses and because small businesses
get different spam than large businesses that they want to capture).
Two features really struck me about the anti-spam appliance: no false positives,
and full wire speed message processing.
Troup says it takes about six months for customers to believe there are no
false positives and stop going through their quarantine folder. How does MailFoundry
accomplish this? Troup says they built the appliance from the ground up to have
no false positives, rather than going the traditional route and blocking spam
and tweaking it to reduce false positives. They focus on all the network identifiers
that identify spam in incoming messages, rather than content filtering.
In fact, MailFoundry didn't include a quarantine at first because they didn't
need it. Customers demanded a quarantine to pass all the check-off box reviews
against competitors who use their own quarantines quite a bit.
How to clear messages in real time and avoid a queue and the required hard
disk cache? Dedicated processing, lean software, and eliminating 90 percent
of spam from network indicators thereby avoiding content analysis. Delaying
messages and spooling them off to disk means they could be lost if the disk
crashes. Since many ISPs buy MailFoundry appliances, speed and reliability matters.
No one likes spam, and Troup promises e-mail can be fun again. Since they have
a 30 day trial period, all you have to lose is a few million spam messages when
you try MailFoundry.
Troup interview:
http://www.podtech.net/home/4702/mailfoundry-ceo-david-troup-speaks
