Canning spam, New server product for ISPs cuts junk e-mail off before it can annoy

Anyone who has an e-mail address has at some time experienced the irritation of "spam," those unsolicited sales pitches that are the electronic equivalent of junk mail.

While spam is merely bothersome to users whose mailboxes may be clogged with the stuff, spam is a serious matter of lost revenue for Internet service providers. Because a single spam e-mail can be directed to thousands of addresses, an avalanche of spam can degrade the performance of ISPs' e-mail services. Worse yet, when "spammers" bounce messages off an ISP by using it as a relay host for their unwanted messages, the messages arrive with the ISP's domain name, giving the mistaken impression that the ISP condones this behavior.

One company is positioning itself as a provider of highly-reliable and highly-scalable e-mail systems for ISPs and is taking aim at this unwanted element of the Internet. Software.com, a maker of messaging software, has released a new version of its Internet messaging server software product Post.Office that allows ISPs to block messages from offending domains or Internet protocol addresses.

These restrictions allow ISPs to deny the use of their messaging servers as relay hosts for unsolicited e-mail and to block unwanted e-mail from entering their services, thereby eliminating unwanted spamming - a differentiation that could have a significant effect on customers in the churn-happy ISP market.

The system is designed to give ISPs flexibility in dealing with chronic spammers. Post.Office can deny simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) connections from specified IP addresses, effectively cutting off SMTP hosts known to originate spam, or it can reject incoming messages based on the sender's return e-mail address. Similarly, the system can fully disable the relay of e-mail coming from specified IP addresses, disable the relay of e-mail coming from specified domains, or enable the relay of only the e-mail from certain specified domains.

"Most of the major spammers are fairly well-known, and their ranks do not change every day," said Valder Coha, president and chief executive officer of Software.com, which has headquarters in both Lexington, Mass., and Santa Barbara, Calif. "This system can't target the new users who spam, or occasional spammers, but it does give system administrators the ability to control the volume of spam and react more precisely when a customer complains about unwanted mail from a specific address.

The upgraded software can also help ISPs better understand their own needs. "This helps us when it comes to network planning," said Robert Boyle, a network engineer at Garden Networks, a New Jersey-based ISP. "With thousands of spam messages in queue, it makes it virtually impossible to know what we need to do to improve performance. If the decision is between adding more hardware to handle all this spam traffic and using software like this to lessen the load, it's an easy decision to make."

Future releases of the Post.Office server, which is aimed at servers with 20,000 to 50,000 subscribers, and Inter.Mail, a sister product that scales to 150,000 users, will enable ISPs to set limits on the number of identical messages sent to a domain, automatically blocking "broadcasts" of spam messages, Coha said.

"A very big, if not the biggest, churn factor for ISPs is reliable e-mail," Coha said. "If it works, it's a barrier to churn. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how good the rest of your service's features are. The goal here is to make e-mail as consistent as the dial tone."

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