Better Spam Detection

Since spam isn't going away anytime soon, what is an email service provider to do? Image spam that gets through clogs mail servers with useless and dangerous emails, and then there still those spam-bots that seem to function like manure spreaders, just tossing more and more email out hoping to sprout one seed in a million.

So what is Message Partners doing about it. First, we've instituted Spam Traps. Populate your site or email posts with easily harvested addresses and configure our spam traps to block senders to these addresses. Since our spam traps use regular expression matching you can block whole classes of addresses, such as addresses that begin with numbers, or others that are popular in dictionary attacks. You should examine some of your maillogs to find addresses that are used in dictionary attacks or repetitive spam attacks. This alone will increase spam detection by a few percentage points.

Read more about Message Partners, and MPP improvements, right here.

Spam Must Be Stopped

I found the recent news from Message Labs highly disturbing that detailed the growing use of social engineering spam attacks, as in cyber-thieves learning as much about their spam targets as possible, even sending fake messages to the wives of CEO's, trying to find any weak spot in a companies security so as to gain access and do damage.

And with MPP 3.4, we have vastly improved on an already excellent email protection platform. Below is one way Message Partners' can help stop spam, phishing, and virus attacks:

You can now use MPP within Procmail scripts, so say you have on local delivery a Procmail script that says ‘scan all messages,’ this gives you access to all our scanning modules such as Cloudmark or Commtouch. So say you have Procmail script send us the messages, we scan it, send the result back to Promail, then Procmail takes the appropriate action.

This would save a lot of time for the customer because if they want to use Cloudmark in a Procmail script they would have to license the Cloudmark engine, do the development work, and that can very time consuming from a business perspective and a technical perspective.

To hear the all of our podcasts, or to read more about MPP, simply click here.

Simple but Powerful API Interface

With our newest release at Message Partners, MPP 3.4, we have designed an easy-to-use but powerful way to give service providers an API Interface. Here is how it works:

With MPP, You set all of the actions, including “on clean,” “on infection,” “on spam messages,” “on content violations,” every action to reject, then any script can send MPP a message via LMTP or SMTP and MPP will scan the message and then return the template response that you created from your rejection templates. Then the script will parse the response and do whatever it is instructed to do with the message.

The API interface is very simple to implement but very powerful. This gives any script access to all of the MPP scanning modules, as well as the MPP policy engine, which can make differentiated scanning decisions based on domain or email address, etc.

To hear the full podcast, simply click right here.

Better Archival For Better Email

As email has evolved into an irreplaceable business tool, email retrieval has become just as necessary as safe and secure email. And then there's compliance, where saving and storing email in most industries is now the law. With the release of MPP 3.4, we have greatly advanced the save and retrieval capabilities of an email platform, an email platform that also protects and secures your email.

Here's more on our improvements: We’ve simplified our database scheme now and we’ve added some fields to make certain repetitive queries like when a domain administrator logs in, for instance, or searching all messages by specific date ranges. We’ve optimized our indexes and redesigned our databases so we do not need ‘joins’ to do these things and that makes the database scale much better, reduces the number of tables, and reduces the complexity of the SQL functionality.


To hear the full podcast, just click right here.

Spam Will Only Getting Worse

Not long ago I came across an article at eWeek that points out one of the main problems with trying to stop spam and stop botnets: many of the big service providers, like Verizon, simply do not and will not try to stop botnets operating on their network.

This comes from a recent study by Trend Micro when, measuring spam, found that Verizon sent almost twice the volume of spam as the next biggest spammer.

Obviously, Verizon has to be aware of the abuse on their network, but the fact is that their business plan is not designed to stop it. It's simply much cheaper to allow the spamming continue then start cutting off customers which requires a large investment in customer-service and the inherent risks of occasionally offending a customer.

Also, Verizon's bandwidth is all symmetric pipes, and bandwidth at an ISP is overwhelmingly downstream. That means they have plenty of upstream bandwidth to spare.

So expect spamming, and botnets, to keep growing. That's why at Message Partners we have developed the most intelligent and integrated email platform available anywhere to protect your email. Check us out right here.

Scalability and Your Email System

Just want to post a quick blog about scalability and your email platform. Scalability is not just about how many messages per second. It’s really more of a global view of the entire architecture. Not only is it about how many messages can you process in a second but, also, how does the quarantine structure scale, how does the archival system scale, how do the database structures scale, how does the threading model scale, how do you respond to bursts of traffic because email is a very bursty type of traffic.

With the release of MPP 3.4, we have addressed all of those issues. To hear a podcast about our this, you can just click right here.

Companies Must Get Proactive About Security

There appears to be a sea-change happening in corporate security as, with all the electronic ink being spilled over corporate security attacks, the companies are starting to take notice. In fact, it has been reported that security is fast becoming a critical part of a companies IT budget.

While in the majority, most companies are probably still trying to just hope for the best in terms of security, as I've heard quoted somewhere, Hope is not a plan. But a recent vulnerability discussion at Gartner clearly showed there is a big shift in the works.

Experts say the current rule of thumb is companies should allocate 5 percent of their development budget to testing. Other estimates go as high as 25 percent (which includes quality assurance). And while 25 percent may seem quite high (it sure seems steep to me), the fact that the very survival of TJX is now under question because of a data breach brings that into sharp focus.

And while computer threats are constantly shifting and changing, email continues to be one of the central soft spots for both extracting vital information and for mounting an attack. And we have just launched with our newest realease, MPP 3.4, that is one of our most significant leaps forward to date, adding significant functionality, speed, heightened security, and ease of use. Check us out right here.