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.

Kill Spam Dead

Just posted the newest podcast about Message Partners newest release, MPP 3.4, where our focus was to improve functionality and scalability.

We are the security platform for Service Providers and other large email providers, and 3.4 only makes us better. With MPP, you can fully customize each customers spam white and black lists, spam settings, you name it. MPP also comes with a complete compliance solution, so listen to the podcast, or simply visit our main page.

Improved Email Defenses

While it's nearly a universally known fact that 9 out of every 10 emails is spam, this could lead one to conclude that such a statistic means that spam filters are actually improving, making the spammers work harder.

This in fact was confirmed by a recent quote from a security expert:

A lot of the technology that we've seen up till now has been designed to pick out the bad mails. That made sense when spam was 15% of all mail, but now that it's 85%, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be picking out nine out of 10 mails. Now, we can authenticate good messages and pull them out of the mail stream and move them to higher ground. Things like reputation systems and DKIM give us a record of good senders so we know who sends good mail and who doesn't. Some of the ISPs have been doing outbound authentication for a while and it's working. Some of the bigger legitimate companies that are using DKIM or Sender ID are saying, if you get anything from me that fails Sender ID, please drop it. They'd rather have messages with broken signatures dropped than have them hurt their reputations.

Well said, and that's exactly what my company, Message Partners, is doing, and as we are one of the main email platform suppliers for ISPs, this is good news.

And as spam costs close to nothing per millions of message sent, I imagine that means spammers will just have to keep increasing their volume. Who knows, if botnets keep growing at their current pace, spam might reach 99 out of every 100 messages sent. That's why we built such versatility and speed into MPP, so check us out right here.

Corporate Networks Harboring Spam Bots

A recent study found that 42% of all computers infected with botnets are on corporate computers. So the spam you get in your inbox may actually be coming from inside your own company, although that's not what they mean when they warn of insider attacks.

That's a pretty big number, but what it doesn't tell you is the length of time the botnet might have been on the corporate LAN. But the simple fact is, getting a botnet onto a corporate system would be golden for a botnet operator, as it would allow them to faster and larger spam attacks where the spam would be originating from a known corporate signature.

That's all the more reason companies who depend on email need to invest in the top rated MPP, from Message Partners, which you can read more about right here.

Spam Still Very Dangerous

I found a recent warning by Sophos about recent spammings that, while they might seem not to be a threat, they can actually take control of a user's computer if the user clicks on the enclosed link and goes to the website.

This seems on par with the recent news that it was only high-level executives that were caught up in a recent Better Business Bureau spamming scam. This is the new type of spam attack where, instead of trying to spam everybody, they carefully chose their targets, thereby staying under the radar and avoiding press coverage.

So the fact is, spamming continues to get more sophisticated, and many of the old engines simply aren't sufficient to detect and remove these newer threats. And that is exactly why Message Partners developed MPP, which makes companies independent of spam scanners (which, once a company goes with one antispam engine, it is very difficult to remove, and often requires a complete restart).

MPP also enables companies to run more than one spam scanner, as well as utilize both commercial and open source scanning options, which often is necessary for large email systems. MPP even let's you set different thresholds for different departments, as Sales often needs a totally different setting than Legal. Check Message Partners out right here.