The latest upgrade from the anti-spam provider adds security and ISP-friendly features.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 18, 2007]

Woburn, Mass.-based Reflexion announced the release of Reflexion Total Control 5.0 (RTC 5). Because version 4 was released on May 17, 2006 (see Reflexion Anti-Spam) we ask David Hughes, president and CEO of Reflexion whether the company's on an annual upgrade cycle, but he says that's not the intention.

Hughes says the company's doing well. "We're now up to 2,500 customers and have a network of 225 partners."

He says that the latest release focuses on three core areas:

Packaging. The solution is easier to brand, and it is possible for an ISP to have its brand for its direct customers while allowing resellers to have their own logos appear on the user interface.

Business practice. In the past, the company sold to ISPs on a per user per month basis. Now the company allows per domain pricing, having found that's easier for some ISPs to track.

Technology. The product incorporates Reflexion Outbound Mail Auditing (ROMA), ensuring an ISP does not send out viruses or spam. It also allows ISPs to limit new users to, for example, 250 messages per day. "That would prevent a spammer from logging on and sending spam and ruining the ISP's reputation," says Scott Barlow, Reflexion vice president of sales and marketing.

The company has made other technological improvements as well. It has improved LDAP integration to make the product easier to install. In addition, the product maintains the LDAP connection so that when users are added or removed, their protection is automatically added or removed.

Barlow says that the daily summary of blocked messages was scoring high on anti-spam filters and was sometimes blocked. Of course, Reflexion software does not block Reflexion's own messages, but some users supplement the anti-spam protection their ISP provides with a filter plug-in for their e-mail client, and such filters would block an e-mail consisting mostly of spammy headers. The Reflexion system now allows the ISP to see what happened if a specific e-mail is misplaced.

Given the prevalence of dictionary attacks, the system now drops a connection if it receives an e-mail to a nonexistent address.

The next enhancement, expected within sixty days, is improved methods for handling spam using non-Latin character sets.

Defend the addresses
Best of all, says Hughes, the market is starting to realize that Reflexion's method of protecting e-mail from spam is the way to go. The company uses disposable e-mail addresses (the company calls them "protective addresses"). Senders such as amazon.com can reach users only through a specific address. Mail from other senders to the "protective address" is dropped.

This significantly reduces spam.

Other ISPs and anti-spam providers offer disposable e-mail addresses, but none that we know of do so with the flexibility and features that Reflexion offers. Google's Gmail system for disposable e-mail addresses is the worst we've seen (see A Second E-Mail Address for Your G-Mail Account).

Yes, Reflexion has a huge number of features, but if you choose it, we suspect you'll choose it for the disposable e-mail addresses.

Pricing and availability
The product is available now. Pricing per domain is available upon request. Price per mailbox per month has dropped from $0.99 to $0.50. "That price includes everything," reiterates Barlow. "It includes anti-virus, open relay prevention, e-mail continuity, phishing prevention, and more."

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