MailFoundry says no false positives

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