Webhost Adds to Anti-Spam Battery

It takes more than one piece of software to blow away the spam onslaught, especially if you're a webhost managing thousands of domains.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 16, 2006]

Tom Mulkern is on the phone to talk about Reflexion anti-spam. He's the reference customer the company named. He's the CEO of a pair of Andover, Mass.-based companies, OnNet Web Hosting, which he founded in 1998, and his reseller company, ValueReseller Hosting, which he founded in 2003.

"We run about 25 severs. We own our own equipment in a local data center," he says. "We have about 10,000 websites."

The company uses HSphere from Positive Software as a control panel. We know less about it than its competition, so we ask. "HSphere is a more advanced control panel," Mulkern says. "We run a clustered environment, with both Linux and Windows. It's complex to manage, but has many useful features."

The company already uses SpamAssassin and Gateway Defender to protect its customers, but spam has remained a significant problem. "Certain customers were targeted by mail attacks, so we've been trying many solutions."

Key features
Mulkern needed something to take the load off the mail servers. He found it in Reflexion, which he added about eight months ago. He says. "They have a way of vaporizing dictionary attacks before they hit our network. They dump all e-mail to unknown users."A recently added feature that Mulkern likes is a monthly activity summary. This tells each customer what the software did for them that month. At ISP-Planet, we strongly recommend that ISPs let users see what their services are doing for them.

Mulkern also uses Reflexion to filter outbound mail. It's something we've recommended, with caveats, for years (see The Spam Conundrum).

We've been worried about what would happen if an ISP erroneously blocked a customer's e-mail. Mulkern says that's not a problem. Instead, he's worried about being blacklisted by services like SpamCop. "It's like torching a garden because there's one weed in it. Customers will complain if they cannot send an e-mail to Comcast or Hotmail because we're on a blacklist."

Profit center
Best of all, OnNet earns money from the Reflexion service.

For regular users, SpamAssassin and Gateway Defender are fine. OnNet sells Reflexion as a premium option. "We charge $9.95 per month per domain," says Mulkern. "Of course, our resellers get a break on pricing. It's important to us that we pay Reflexion per domain. Postini, in contrast, charges per mailbox, and if a customer has 30 or 40 or 50 mailboxes, the pricing is prohibitive."

The per-domain fee from Reflexion covers 25 mailboxes, but volume discounts are available, so a customer with 50 mailboxes would pay $14.95 per month.

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