Solinus, the company that built Green Bay Online, HostMail.com, and other Web-delivered services, is now selling an anti-spam appliance specifically designed for ISPs and webhosts.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [May 12, 2003]

Solinus, of Green Bay, Wisc., is a Web Services holding company that was formed to manage a variety of buinesses that grew out of Green Bay Online (GBOL). Solinus was founded in 1999; GBOL in 1994.

The ISP business was sold in 2002, and what remains are HostMail.com, Mail2Go.com, DMiNTERACTIVE (a Web design company that was part of GBOL), and the company's latest venture, an anti-spam appliance called MailFoundry.

The MailFoundry solution was developed in house for HostMail, as shown here. Says David Troup, president of Solinus, "our e-mail filtering product in HostMail got rave reviews. ISPs wanted a product that would work with SendMail or Exchange or whatever they were using."

Troup started to build the product with hardware from SUN Microsystems, which he says offers a secure foundation. "We wanted to produce an appliance that was not built on cheap Intel hardware, but was price competitive with an Intel-based product," he says.

An alliance with SUN allows the company to offer replacement of a failed machine in one day, with the help of SUN's worldwide network. "The MailFoundry configuration defined by the ISP can be backed up locally or to the MailFoundry website," explains Troup. "If it's backed up to our data center, we can install it on the box with their custom settings and get it to them the next day."

The alliance also gives Solinus access to SUN's sales muscle. "Large telcos and ISPs trust SUN hardware and have relationships with SUN," Troup enthuses.

A key benefit of basing the product on SUN's intellectual property is the scalability of the hardware and its Solaris operating system, Troup claims. He says that one potential client has a 48 processor SUN Enterprise 10000, purchased for a project that was never completed, who is considering using the box for Troup's software. "That could be the largest e-mail filter ever built," he says. The size of a SUN Enterprise 10000 can be measured in many ways, but consider this one number: the SUN Enterprise 10000 weighs 1,800 pounds when fully configured.

With demand for beefy products like this, Solinus is developing a high-end version of its product. Troup says he won't have to change the software to support over 500,000 users, but is still testing the hardware.

The current version is designed for small- and medium-sized ISPs and uses single- or dual-processor SUN boxes. Troup says, "the SUN sales staff like us. When small SUN boxes first came out, they did not have many applications specially built for them."

Solinus has partnered with Sophos for anti-virus. Sophos specializes in business services, and has a large following is Europe, but may not be as recognizable to end users as the makers of desktop home user anti-virus software.

Configuration is designed to be easy, as the screen shot (right) shows, requiring the administrator to answer a series of simple questions.

Troup says that webhosts are increasingly concerned with a specific problem caused by spammers' dictionary attacks. When a spammer tries to imagine every possible e-mail at a specific domain, all of those millions of e-mails may go to one e-mail address, a "catch-all" mailbox set up to accept mail directed to mailboxes other than those already defined. "ISPs can tell the box, 'these are real mailboxes, these are aliases,'" says Troup. "On our system, this feature has stopped an additional 1.5 million to 2 million messages per month caused by network level dictionary attacks."

The anti-spam product works much like anti-virus software, with spam "signatures" updated every 10 minutes. Although the signatures are tested by Solinus, an automatic roll back feature ensures that if an update creates problems on an ISP's network, the previous version of the signatures is used. "We working on adding manual rollback to a future version of the software," Troup says.

He notes that customers demand integration with their billing systems. "We have custom APIs and our ISP customers can ask for us to work on integration with their own custom billing system. We have not charged anyone yet because it's usually only a couple of hours of work."

He adds, "when I was an ISP owner, I was approached by a lot of companies. I usually said that I'd buy it but not on the terms they were offering." To that end, Troup accepts that some ISPs will want to pay Solinus month by month while others will be able to prepay quarterly or annually.

"When we're talking to customers," Troup says, "we explain that we owned an ISP. We don't want customers to be afraid to call us. We understand your business model and we'll collaborate with our ISP customers to make MailFoundry work for you in your environment."

Pricing and availability
The MailFoundry appliance is available now at $2,995 for the box, plus a monthly fee starting at $0.31 per mailbox per month. Volume discounts are available. Prepayment discounts are also available: 5 percent for an ISP that prepays every quarter and 10 percent for an ISP that prepays annually. Fault tolerant deployments of this product will use more than one box.

A small business product supporting up to 100 mailboxes is also available for $1,995 plus a higher per-mailbox fee.

—End