A company with an intriguing pedigree adds a new idea to the anti-spam arms race.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 9, 2007]

Steve Kirsch has already founded for companies. You may not have heard of Mouse Systems Corporation, and you may know just a little about Frame Technology Corporation (acquired by Adobe Systems in 1995), but you certainly know Infoseek (acquired by Disney in 1999) and you may do business with Propel Software.

Kirsch's latest company, San Jose, Calif.-based anti-spam provider Abaca, was founded in 2005. The company touts its anti-spam guarantee as one differentiator. For each day in which you get more spam than the company says you will, you get a day of free service. Kathy Contreras, Abaca director of marketing, says that the company has a 100 percent renewal rate on its service.

The company's second differentiator is its receiver reputation system. ISPs are familiar with the idea of sender reputation: a system tracks where spam is coming from and if a message comes from an address or domain that has sent spam in the past, that message is deemed more likely to be spam.

Receiver reputation (a patent-pending invention, says Contreras) tracks which e-mail recipients receive more mail as a percentage of the total mail they receive. An e-mail received by a spammy recipient is more likely to be spam.

The system depends on the idea that some people are more tolerant of spam than others. It's called ReceiverNet.

The system uses other anti-spam tools; it does not depend on ReceiverNet. For example, it can identify and block dictionary attacks and score messages sent to nonexistent users as more likely to be spam.

It can deliver regular e-mail reports to users concerning the contents of the quarantine.

ReceiverNet Premium Service incorporates anti-spam from Authentium.

Bill Kasje, Abaca director of business development, says that a key advantage of ReceiverNet is its ability to identify rare or previously unseen messages as spam. "You need just a few recipients to determine if it's spam."

He touts the fact that the system doesn't rely on aspects of the message that the spammer controls. "A spammer can manipulate the content of a message to evade filters and can switch e-mail addresses to avoid sender reputation systems," he says.

Kasje adds that in business, many recipients have little control over the amount of spam they receive. If their name is public, it's often easy to guess their e-mail address. Others, as a job function, hand out their e-mail on marketing materials or press releases. Last but not least, commonly used e-mail aliases like sales@ receive a significant amount of spam.

Packages
The service is available as an appliance, the Abaca E-mail Protection Gateway (currently available in versions for 100 users and 1,000 users). It is also available as a virtual appliance, designed to run on Microsoft and VMWare (VMWare certification is pending, but Contreras says the service is already running with several customers).

Pricing and availability
Currently, the EPG 100 is available for $1,495, plus $180 per year for advance swap replacement. The EPG 1000 is available for $3,495 plus $300 per year advance swap replacement.

The VPG 1500 is priced at $495, and the purchaser supplies the hardware.

In addition, the ReceiverNet Service is priced starting at $1.19 per mailbox per month, and premium service is priced starting at $1.49 per user per month.

Basic e-mail and web-based support is free ("we want all customers to have basic support," says Kasje). Working hours (8x5) support is available for an additional 15 percent of the ReceiverNet annual fees, and 24 hour (24x7) support is available for an additional 30 percent of the ReceiverNet annual fees.

As always, it's a good thing when a company is willing to explain its pricing in detail.

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