Version 6 of the mail server for Windows has added anti-spam features to its offering, which includes MailSite SP, a mail server designed expressly for service providers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [September 25, 2003]

Campbell, Calif.-based Rockliffe recently released version 6 of its mail server, MailSite, which contains many improvements. For ISPs, the most significant improvement may be the inclusion of an anti-spam engine that provides a enhanced, more mangeable version of ActiveState, the Perl-based anti-spam software which is one of the cheapest solutions on the market but which is not the easiest to manage.

Andrew Lochart, Rockliffe vice president of marketing, says the company was very impressed by ActiveState. "We were impressed by this cocktail approach. They use several different spam analysis techniques. We use it as a "black box" that produces a spam score from 1 to 100. We supplement ActiveState with sieve filters and user-administrated whitelists and blacklists."

Lochart says ActiveState is already effective, even without the measures Rockliffe takes to supplement it. "ActiveState says that it blocks 98 percent of spam if the spam block level is set to 50 or more. That's the same as saying that 98 percent of spam will receive a score of 50 or higher from ActiveState's software."

"They also do neat things with their blacklist system," enthuses Lochart. "ActiveState's engine knows how to do network checks with a variety of blacklists. They can readjust the weighting of the results of the various blacklists. For example, one blacklist recently blacklisted the entire Internet. ActiveState heard the news and immediately assigned a weight of zero to that blacklist and pushed out the new definition to its subscribers."

ISPs may not want to block spam at the server level. Lochart says, "false positives are a pretty bad thing in most environments, but they are especially bad for ISPs. ISPs might want to skim off the most egregious spam at the server level, such as spam with a score of 90 or higher. Our rules can be implemented at the system, domain, or mailbox level, allowing users or administrators to set their own rules at any level."

User control, asserts Lochart, is especially important for ISPs. "Put the control in the users' hands. If a user wants to bounce spam with a score of 10 or higher, they'll get a lot of false positives."

Lochart says, "ISPs are an important market segment for us. We designed MailSite SP so that the service provider can turn anti-spam service on on a per-mailbox basis. If the ISP has 100,000 subscribers but only 20,000 sign up for spam filtering, they can buy only 20,000 spam filtering licenses."

MailSite comes with protection against spammers' dictionary attacks. Many spammers will send e-mail to a list of possible addresses at an ISP. This list, which could be huge, might tie up a mail server and slow down the delivery of legitimate e-mail. Explains Lochart, "If half of the first 100 e-mail addresses that an IP address attempts delivery to are bad, we blacklist the IP, and drop the connection for 8 hours. The administrator can choose to blacklist the IP permanently, but we set it to temporary because it could be a hijacked server."

Large ISPs need to provision users quickly, and Lochart says MailSite has the perfect feature for that, mailbox templates. "In Microsoft Word, users can define their standard fonts and margins. We look at a mailbox as a large number of properties, including size limit or quota, spam filtering turned on or not, and POP only or is IMAP or webmail allowed. We you add a new subscriber, you just give them a basic template, such as POP only, 10 MB limit, no filtering."

Also, Lochart claims the company offers scalable Windows hardware. "We keep the data servers separate from the application servers so that there's scalability for each. Generally, the data servers need a greater degree of redundancy because losing a single application server is not a problem, but losing a single piece of data is. If you lose an application server, you lose a connection, but the user reconnects immediately."

For the future, Rockliffe is building a groupware system. "It's a DLL file that fools Microsoft Outlook into thinking it's talking to a Microsoft Exchange server when it's not, it's talking to our IMAP server," explains Lochart. The server stores calendar items as specially formatted messages. It is due to be released in October.

Partners
Rockliffe, which has been in the mail business for some time, has developed partnerships with relevant software providers. The company integrates with Rodopi for billing, and also allows the Sphera provisioning tool (for webhosting) to push data to the mailsite server. For anti-virus, the company uses F-Secure.

The company offers its own webmail system. "It's popular with SP customers and we don't charge extra for it," says Lochart.

The interface is available in 19 languages because Rockliffe does business around the world.

Pricing and availability
MailSite version 6 is available now. For small ISPs, MailSite SE for 500 mailboxes is priced at $1,495. Pricing for larger installations, which require MailSite SP instead of MailSite SE, was not available at press time.

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