The company that claims it built the world's first anti-spam router gets spun off from the parent company, standing alone on the strength of its technology.

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

It takes a lot of work to run an anti-spam company, and Lucinda Duncalfe Holt felt that SpamSquelcher deserved to stand on its own, separate from Paoli, Pa.-based ePrivacyGroup.

So on January 7, 2004, she and David Brussin, formerly CTO of ePrivacyGroup, founded Conshohocken, Pa.-based TurnTide to rename, re-launch, and re-examine the SpamSquelcher product.

Holt is CEO of the new company and Brussin is CTO. ePrivacyGroup's CEO, Vincent Schiavone, is chief strategic officer (CSO) of TurnTide and remains in charge of ePrivacyGroup.

The product, TurnTide Anti-Spam Router (TurnTide ASR) offers an unusual take on anti-spam, targeting message paths instead of individual messages, slowing traffic flows that seem suspicious or spammy (similar to the approaches of Openwave and Commtouch).

TurnTide thus complements other traditional anti-spam strategies such as filtering and user permit and deny lists.

When we last wrote about it (see Slower Spam Would Annoy Spammers), the product was sold for a flat fee, starting at $19,000. The relaunched TurnTide ASR is sold as a service.

But that's not the only change. "The technology has grown up," says Brussin. A deployment can interrupt service for as little as 10 seconds, requires no IP address, and Brussin says that most mail sessions don't get interrupted.

For larger companies and larger deployments, TurnTide now offers clustering to deliver high availability.

The most significant change, however, is that TurnTide is now a network, with TurnTide ASRs collaborating to fight spam. "Each system operated in its own little universe," says Brussin. "Now all systems share data with our data center on the history of all the network paths they've seen. We can protect the rest of our network after an attack on one part of the network."

The idea is that a collaborative network can spot trends that individual TurnTide ASRs might miss. "We can stop even highly distributed attacks," says Brussin. "Today, many are using open proxies. We look not just at the point source, but at trends across networks, and investigate BGP routes to look at specific physical devices. We want to impact the spammer behind the attack, not just individual systems."

Brussin says that on average, service providers get 90 percent fewer messages after deploying TurnTide, and that's a much bigger savings than just blocking spam by filtering it. It's so effective that Brussin claims some customers aren't filtering at all. "Our customers who have filters keep using them (but they need fewer servers and it works better). Those who aren't using filtering tend not to add it."

We catch up with Mark Lemmert, CTO of Appleton, Wisc.-based Athenet Data Exchange at the government relations seminar of the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association. Lemmert, who is serving as a reference customer for TurnTide for both sales and public relations, takes time to talk to us between sessions.

He installed the product in January of this year. Lemmert says there was an "absolute explosion in mail volume since September of last year." Mail volume was doubling every few months, and the filter, IronMail from CipherTrust, couldn't keep up.

Lemmert was faced with the prospect of adding servers regularly, which would have been too expensive. "TurnTide was about a $25,000 a year unbudgeted expense," says Lemmers, "but it was cheaper than buying more filters every few months."

His experience has been as promised. Implementation was flawless, and involved no network disruption. Message volume has gone down. "People are still getting more than one or two spams a day, but there's been a noticeable improvement," Lemmert concludes.

Similar data comes from one of TurnTide's oldest customers, Little Rock, Ark.-based Aristotle. Carl Shivers, Aristotle's CTO, spoke at ISPCON last year about TurnTide in a session called The War on Spam: Report from the Front Lines, which I moderated.

In a recent press release from TurnTide, Aristotle reported that its 27,000 mailboxes received a peak of 900,000 e-mails each day. After deployment, mail volume dropped to 150,000 per day.

Pricing and availability
The product is available now from TurnTide. Pricing of the TurnTide ASR-SP series, designed for service providers, varies widely. Pricing starts at $20,000 per year and volume discounts are available. Typically, an ISP would pay from $1.50 per user per year down to as little as $.50 per user per year

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