When the carriers need anti-spam software that can scale to protect millions of subscribers, they call on Openwave.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [October 16, 2003]

Founded in 1994 in Redwood City, Calif., Openwave (NASDAQ: OPWV) is a veteran e-mail services company providing not just anti-spam but complete e-mail and even messaging solutions to service providers in a product called Openwave Email MX. In that, it resembles Rockliffe, Sendmail Inc., and perhaps Mirapoint. However, Openwave's customer list distinguishes it from its competition.

Serving major service providers around the world, the company claims 139 million licensed mailboxes including 42 percent of broadband accounts worldwide, 1,400 employees, all served through over 150 carrier class e-mail customers (those serving over 500,000 users). Some of its smaller accounts are Century Tel and Alltel.

The company's messaging platform provides a robust, scalable system separating the e-mail directory, message store, IMAP server, POP server, queue server, directory cache, and other elements so that each element can be scaled without affecting any other.

David Staas, senior product marketing manager for anti-abuse products, says that current trends in the telecommunications market favor Openwave. "In 2002, the overall industry grew 22 percent, and our installed base grew 29 to 30 percent," he says. "There are two trends that favor us. One is consolidation. The big companies are getting bigger, and ours is the only system that works in large scale environments."

"The other trend is the transition from dialup to broadband," he adds. "In networks serving dialup, you have peaks in the morning and evening, and the network is designed to handle those peaks. But broadband is always on, with e-mail always open. Broadband is getting pinged by the end user every five minutes, and that takes a lot of resources."

Messages change when users shift from dialup to broadband. "The number of messages per user goes up and the average message size goes up as users send more attachments. The data volume is the most intense the industry has ever seen. @Home was one of our first broadband deployments, and it was the first broadband system in the world to serve over one million users."

Providers, however, are looking beyond messaging to the value-added services it enables. Openwave is supporting J-Phone's photo messaging in Tokyo, for example. And, of course, Openwave is now supporting anti-spam.

In addition to extra revenue, carriers are looking to anti-spam to protect their networks from elite hackers. Says Staas, "if you're a spammer, a service provider is your holy grail. Why harvest from a 1,000 person enterprise if you can get millions of addresses from a service provider with the same amount of effort? At one of our conferences recently, a Japanese provider said that their mobile operator receives 1 billion messages per day, of which 800 million are spam."

Staas says that since 86 percent of all viruses are now delivered by e-mail, anti-spam and anti-virus are two parts of the same effort -- protecting subscribers. He identifies three types of spammers: mass marketers who see themselves as legitimate, malicious attackers who are trying to damage the network or the end user's system, and hackers who seek fame by trying to shut down large service providers.

Openwave fights spam at three levels: at the edge of the network, where each piece of spam discarded saves network costs; close to the inbox, where the Openwave MX software enables the deployment of one or multiple filtering and anti-spam applications; and at the inbox itself, where end users can implement their own filters and parental controls.

Staas says that implementing interfaces for anti-spam products rather than specifying a single product for everyone provides needed flexibility. "It's not enough just to block spam. You need to have an evolving strategy because what's in place today could be invalid in a few months."

Openwave has considered challenge-response but has not implemented it. "It would be easy to implement but it's not yet built in," says Staas. "It's had a mixed response from customers because it burdens the end user. There's a concern that challenge-response makes it more difficult for legitimate messaging to occur. Our customers are not quite sure that it's effective, and feel that too much has to happen for legitimate mail to be delivered."

Even the most basic of protections at the edge can have an immediate impact. Staas says that one customer who handled 59 million connections per day (with each connection delivering one or more messages) found that 56 million of those, on average, were directory harvest attacks and could be discarded.

Staas warns that blocking IPs is not enough. "We find that the average lifetime of an IP address is less than 20 minutes. We limit the number of simultaneous connections from a range of IPs so that we can catch a spammer as they bounce around, using various IPs. Entire MTAs share information on monitoring connections and the behavior of spammers."

For anti-spam, the company is currently working with McAffee but until recently worked with Trend Micro, which is still supported.

Pricing and availability
Openwave MX is available now. Pricing varies widely, and services like Brightmail and McAffee are not included in the basic price. Staas says that the price is generally a few dollars per user for deployments of at least one million users, but says that by lowering support, administration, and deployment costs, carriers realize substantial savings over competing products.

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