A business services provider (BSP) who's been around since the ice age era of FIDOCon chooses an improved anti-spam solution.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 18, 2005]

John Souvestre, founder, owner, and self-described chief janitor of Metairie, La.-based business services provider (BSP) Southern Star has been in the business long enough to remember Jack Rickard, to remember BBSCon—even long enough to remember FIDOCon, a conference for those participating in FIDONet (see the Wikipedia definition).

"It started as a hobby BBS, in 1988, and in 1994 I decided to do the Internet thing. I've been an Internet provider for the past 11 years."

He founded the business in the obvious location, in his home in a suburb of New Orleans. More recently, he's moved the equipment to a colocation facility nearby.

The company serves several hundred domains providing e-mail, hosting, and other services. He sells bundles of Internet access, anti-virus, anti-spam, and hosting, but also can manage any piece of that for a company. "The main ingredients are ADSL and hosting."

He keeps pricing simple (but not disclosed for this article). "I want the bill to not look like, say, the phone company!"

The company retains a residential internet customer base from its early days.

For years, Souvestre's used one of the better—but more expensive—mail solutions on the market, CommuniGate Pro from CommuniGate Systems (a company once called Stalker Software—we're glad they changed the name).

Souvestre loved the MTA, but did not like the third party software the company was using. He investigated a few possibilities. At first, he thought he'd opt for SpamAssassin, but soon decided otherwise. "I'd heard good things about it, but I realized that it involved a non-trivial setup, and that keeping the rules up to date would be an ongoing job," explains Souvestre.

Soon he heard of another option. "Someone posted a note on the CommuniGate mailing list about the MPP plus Cloudmark solution. I liked the real time aspect of the software. When I first looked at Cloudmark, it was only available on Windows, but I founded out they had a version that runs on Linux. I'm running FreeBSD, but I decided to give it a try. I'm a FreeBSD novice, about 3 or 4 out of 10, but I got it running flawlessly on a Linux emulator."

How the pipe works
Souvestre has set up a two stage filtration system for removing spam from the pipe. He says CommuniGate Pro bounces about 90 percent of the spam with a very low false positive rate of "about 0.002 percent".

The Cloudmark MPP system, he says, has a false negative rate of less than ten percent, but a higher false positive rate, of close to two percent. The total amount of spam getting through to customers is 10 percent x 10 percent = 1 percent (or slightly less than that). The false positive rate, which is most important to business ISPs, is 0.2 percent.

Asked how much spam each customer gets, Souvestre reminds us that each customer's inbox is different, depending on how much of a web presence they have and the choices they make about privacy.

An added benefit of choosing MPP Cloudmark instead of SpamAssassin is that the MPP solution uses about five percent of the CPU whereas SpamAssassin would require a separate CPU.

You Know MPP
The product, from New Rochelle, N.Y.-based MPP, a subsidiary of New Rochelle, N.Y.-based RAE Internet (for more on RAE Internet, see Anti-Virus Protection for $300 Per Year), is much more than an anti-spam product.

Michael Katz, president of RAE Internet, explains, "it's a platform for new services. It supports five different virus scanners, and allows ISPs to set different configurations for each customer, enabling them to deliver services and charge for them. After all, even 50 cents per customer per month adds up."

Katz is happy to be working with Cloudmark. "Cloudmark delivers an anti-spam product with no rules to update and extremely high performance. MPP extends Cloudmark to work with common MTA's like Sendmail, Qmail, and Postfix, and any MTA based on them."

In summary, Katz is hoping to find more ISP customers. "Cloudmark performs extremely well for our service provider customers. MPP extends Cloudmark by providing anti virus, archival, and many other security services on Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix, and CGPro."

Pricing and availability
The product is available now. Pricing was not disclosed, but is per customer, with the exact price varying depending upon the features the ISP chooses to offer.

Souvestre says that because he did not have to buy an additional box, the MPP solution came in cheaper than SpamAssassin in his TCO calculations. He adds that since pricing is actually per customer, he has had no pricing surprises. Other companies (perhaps CommuniGate?) have pricing tiers with sudden price jumps, so that when you move from "up to 250 customers" to "up to 3,000 customers" the change can be unpleasant.

—End