Anti-Spam Startup Seeks ISP Partners

Vanquish, an anti-spam startup, is looking for small- and medium-sized ISP partners. We spoke to Vanquish and to Netware of North Andover, Mass.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [September 6, 2002]

In these times, it takes a very impressive bunch of names to gather attention for an Internet startup. With ventures failing frequently, the supply of impressive resumes increases every day. A new anti-spam company called Vanquish attracted some notice when Esther Dyson wrote a favorable article in July in her Release 3.0 column. One of Vanquish's many other high-profile advisers is Ronald Rivest, the famous cryptographer.

Since that note in July, though, there has been little publicity, and as the company is privately funded, it can keep a secret well. That will change on Monday, when the company releases its product. We believe we have exclusive notice of Monday's release.

The idea behind Vanquish is also one that has been close to Esther Dyson's heart for some time: raise the cost of spam. The idea is that if any e-mail recipient can impose a small fine, say five cents, on any e-mail sender, that fine will be a barrier to spammers but no barrier to legitimate correspondents. The sender must be able to choose whether or not a message is spam. Explains Vanquish CEO Philip Raymond, "I don't care if you say I signed up for something. It's like pornography in that the viewer has to set the standards."

It's unsolicited, commercial, bulk e-mail that angers Raymond. "I don't mind bulk e-mail if it's Amazon acknowledging my book order, I don't mind commercial e-mail if it's a company I've purchased from before and they've got a special sale, and I don't mind unsolicited e-mail because it might be an old friend," he says.

But unsolicited, commercial, bulk e-mail is wrong. "It's a huge productivity problem. I've got work to do and a baby daughter to go home to and I'm spending 45 minutes each day in the morning and an hour in the evening sorting through spam," says Raymond. As the owner of several domains, with many accounts on each, he gets more spam than many users.

To stop spam, Vanquish attacks only unsolicited bulk e-mail. Spammers send out thousands or tens of thousands of e-mails at a time. A legitimate mailer might send to as many as twenty correspondents, risking a dollar, but a spammer, sending 10,000 e-mails, would risk $500 at five cents per e-mail.

Legitimate senders can buy the Vanquish product, for, say, $25 retail, which gives them a $2.50 account with Vanquish, or they can open an account with Vanquish for as little as $1. ISPs pay Vanquish $2 to $4 per account per year, and $1 of that goes to a Vanquish account.

The product asks permission to access a user's address book or books in all e-mail clients on the user's system, and then builds a "white list" of people who can send e-mail to the user without posting a bond. The white list can be edited at any time, and the program is a very lightweight Java applet that is Java 1.1 compliant. The product adds to the white list every person the user sends e-mail to.

Legitimate marketers will not be penalized by the Vanquish system if they've done their homework. "Most spammers," says Raymond, "don't bother with demographics. The medium's practically free, so they don't need to."

The company uses the public key system that attaches a Vanquish bond to the body of an e-mail. The recipient's client strips the bond and then asks the recipient whether to accept, banish (reject without penalizing), or penalize the sender.

Raymond recognizes that most people will not pay for a Vanquish bond until they've heard of the service, so the company has built a system that will identify a human sender and deny a bulk or computer sender. If the Vanquish e-mail client receives an e-mail that is not on the black list and does not have a bond, it will send a "challenge" back to the sender. The code for the "challenge" is open source.

The sender receives a simple question, such as four pictures of cats and one picture of a fire engine, and is asked to choose which item does not fit. A correct answer gets the e-mail through to the sender, and if the user replies, the sender will be added to the white list.

It's a good system for a start-up, but Raymond hopes to eliminate the challenge system. "We don't believe it's effective for the long term," he says. "If our system gets too popular, it will invite hackers who will find some method for solving the challenge, and then we'll have to higher programmers to improve the challenge, and we'll experience spiraling costs. On the other hand, if we're that popular, people will understand the benefits of Vanquish and we should be able to eliminate the 'challenge' feature."

Raymond also sees flaws in the "challenge" system. "Spam is a one-inch deep lake filled with garbage covering the nation, and every e-mail inbox is drains from that lake. Our 'challenges' do offer a dam against that flow, but they can also produce frustrations. For example, if I send an e-mail late Friday from the office, go home, and find a challenge in my mailbox on Monday, I will not be happy."

In order to allow replies to an e-mail, the client will track e-mail subjects, so that if you send a query to the helpdesk, and an individual responds, the system will use the subject header to ensure that the response gets through.

Raymond recognizes that this may raise privacy concerns. He says, "We don't store white lists or e-mails. It's all on the client's computer, and only a hash of the whitelist e-mails is stored elsewhere. But if you want to be anonymous, you can be. I don't believe we should prevent anonymous e-mail. We're partnering with webmail providers so that people can use Vanquish and remain anonymous. "

Be an Alpha Beta
Most important to Vanquish, however, will be small- and medium-sized ISPs. The company is asking ISPs to get in touch to become a part of the beta testing program. We spoke to one local ISP that is already working with Vanquish.

North Andover, Mass.-based Netway provides webhosting, T-1, dial-up, and wireless broadband services. The company has a spam problem that any other ISP would recognize. Says Chief Technology Officer Douglas Smith, "we consider ourselves a medium sized ISP with over 7,000 mailboxes. We find that only about one of every ten e-mails is legitimate, and because we shut down spammers on our own systems, the ratio of incoming to outgoing mail is about five to one. On any day, we'll have about 3 MB incoming and about 600 K outgoing. This means we need six mail servers just to handle incoming e-mail."

Smith is very pleased with Vanquish. "We sat down with Phil Raymond during summer of last year and explained what our problems were. They're run with most of what we said, and I think they've built a good product."

Smith adds, "they're still in Alpha testing but they're about to go Beta and we'll be one of their first Beta testers. I actually had a customer e-mail me personally asking about an article they'd read that was written by Esther Dyson. When I told them that we were going to beta test that product, they signed on to be one of the first end users.

Raymond says Vanquish is offering significant inducements to ISPs to be early beta testers. "We're letting them keep most of the penalty money, and, more significantly, we're giving them a year or more of free Vanquish service." ISPs, especially small- and medium-sized ISPs, should give this company a closer look.

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