The anti-spam provider announces new services and adds power to its core engine.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 14, 2008]

There are hundreds of anti-spam products on the market, but we keep writing about Woburn, Mass.-based Reflexion for a reason: it offers all of the features that we think an anti-spam product should offer.

Those key features are: challenge-response option, disposable e-mail addresses, whitelist and blacklist capability, filter by character set, and end user controls. The market for anti-spam software is extremely fragmented, and there may be another company among the hundreds of Reflexion competitiors offering the same basket of services, but if so, we don't know of it.

Of those features, the disposable e-mail address is the rarest. The functionality is easy to explain (and, presumably, easy to sell) but difficult to implement right. With Reflexion, if you buy a product at Amazon, you could set up a disposable e-mail address of [my e-mail address].amazon@isp.com. Then, after the purchase, you could turn the address off, or allow only amazon.com to contact it.

Scott Barlow, Reflexion vice president of sales and marketing, says he made one purchase from still-extant Template Monster and received about 24,000 spam messages to the Template Monster disposable e-mail address over the course of a year.

Comments David Hughes, Reflexion CEO, "this disposable e-mail address use case shows how a single ill-advised disclosure of a primary e-mail address can cause a massive spam problem."

Growth
Hughes says Reflexion's doing well. It's grown to about 5,000 customers in approximately 43 countries. Its channel partner program has over 450 solution providers around the world. Q1 revenue was up 58 percent over Q4, he says, and he expects a similarly rosy Q2.

"But we're not satisfied."

Hence, new Reflexion products and added capabilities to existing products.

A better filter
Reflexion is adding RBL support, but Barlow calls it "conservative." The company uses only what it considers to be the best few RBLs, and emphasizes avoiding false positives in its use of RBLs. The result, he says, is that the RBL test rejects 25 percent of all e-mail. The next check, whether the e-mail is sent to an actual user, rejects an additional 56 percent.

The system therefore rejects 25 + 56 = 81 percent of all e-mail (on average) before it hits the filter (see chart, below).

Reflexion's layers of security

The bottom line, Barlow says, is that the spam detection rate has surpassed 99 percent, with a false positive rate of 0.04 percent (that's four per ten thousand).

Further down the line, Reflexion is boosting its Bayesian filter by using the "ham and spam" from whitelist users.

Whitelists allow Reflexion to deliver the e-mail faster, direct to the user without any filtering, Barlow says.

Disposable e-mail addresses, he adds, completely eliminate a common category of false positive: that newsletter your user just signed up for or that purchase confirmation from a vendor your e-mail system has not seen before.

It makes sense: anti-spam systems are designed primarily to fight unsolicited commercial messages. Any error of overzealousness will affect legitimate commercial messages.

A new RADAR
Reflexion's new service is called RADAR, which stands for Reflexion Archiving, Discovery, and Recovery.

Businesses, especially small businesses, need to save e-mail and cannot. They need e-mail archiving for legal reasons such as compliance and court cases, but also in the course of daily business.

Barlow points out that you might just need to retrieve a contract signed eight years ago. If you don't have a paper copy, one would be in the RADAR archive.

And it would be easy to find. He's particlarly pround of the power search feature (see image at right). "You can imagine how proud we were to hear from our users that some have stopped using the Microsoft Outlook search function."

One of those is Barlow himself. "I have 8 GB in my e-mail store. If I search for "Reflexion" in the body of the e-mail, I'll get every e-mail I've sent or received here. RADAR will retrieve that in five seconds. Outlook will freeze up."

How RADAR works
RADAR simply gets a copy of every inbound and outbound e-mail and stores it. Individual users can access their saved e-mails, and adminstrators can access their company's e-mails.

The system indexes e-mails for faster retrieval.

If the end user's mail server goes down, RADAR can operate as a limited backup mail server. Users can compose e-mails over RADAR (complete with address auto complete) and send them, as long as they have internet access and a browser while their e-mail is down.

Once the server is back up, it can retrieve lost e-mail from RADAR.

RADAR can synch with Microsoft Exchange or Hosted Exchange. Barlow adds that end users no longer need to make decisions about what to save and what to keep, or what to save to a .pst file if their 2 GB on the Exchange server is full. The transfer is encrypted, and reduces the amount of e-mail stored in the Exchange system.

It is compatible with Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007, and Small Business Server 2003. "A lot of other solutions don't support Exchange 2007," he notes.

Conclusion
Reflexion's offering a lot of new things, and expects to keep growing. The price remains the same: 50 cents per user per month.

—End