The e-mail provider Everyone.net, known colloquially as "everyone," adds additional mail protection to its portfolio of services.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 12, 2004]

San Jose, Calif.-based Everyone.net will announce its Total Protection 2.0 anti-spam service tomorrow in advance of ISPCON. The service adds extra e-mail protection to the company existing in-house anti-spam protection and its anti-virus protection, which is provided through an alliance with Sophos.

The company, which provides e-mail to over 1 million paying users and many more free accounts, has had an in-house solution for years. But Total Protection 2.0 adds some significant features.

E-mail Fingerprinting places a mark on all outgoing e-mail using a header that contains a unique signature, created with a symmetric encryption key and based on information such as the e-mail user's ID, the time stamp for the e-mail and more. Any incoming bounce, "virus detected," or other system e-mail that does not contain the mark is deleted. Users can turn this feature off if they wish.

The Folder Janitor allows users to limit the size of their quarantine and spam folders so that these folders do not use up all the space in the account.

Everyone continues to embrace IMAP, which allows it to pre-process e-mail on the mail servers so that mail is sorted when downloaded by the client. Everyone has strengthened the rules engine to enable all rules that common e-mail clients could define, as well as some rules they cannot yet do.

Everyone has added an enhanced IMTA (Inbound Message Transfer Agent) buffer zone, allowing it to absorb spikes in traffic when they occur.

The company's heuristic rule set is used to deliver a message to the subscriber's anti-spam folder. Subscribers can set thresholds. For example, a user can review spam rated 3 to 6, put spam rated 6 to 10 in a folder for very suspicious e-mail, and delete e-mail rated 10 or higher. Again, users can choose to receive all e-mail if they wish. These settings are superceded by the ISP's global settings (an ISP would therefore set lenient settings so that users who wished to be more restrictive could choose to be).

One happy subscriber is El Nacional, a newspaper in Venezuela (Venezuela's politics are currently volatile). The company, which has 500 employees, was hit by a bounce storm directory service attack. Just one day after switching to everyone, it went back online, while everyone's servers continue to reject nearly 3 million bounce messages daily.

The company also uses e-mail fingerprinting to help curtail abuse of the company's own e-mail service. Josh Mailman, Everyone.net vice president of marketing, explains this in terms that any ISP will recognize as true. "Although we'd like all our customers to be well behaved, we know that in any population, there are people who will, if not break the rules, do not behave the way we'd like them to behave. Given the amount of spam mail that is spoofed, using e-mail fingerprinting allows us and our ISP partners to quickly determine if the user actually originated the e-mail and to take corrective actions."

—End