Based on the work of the open-source sendmail project, Sendmail, Inc. offers a complete, end-to-end solution for ISPs backed by more than 20 years of experience.

by Jeff Goldman [August 11, 2004]

Sendmail, Inc.'s history stretches back to Eric Allman's creation of the open-source sendmail project in 1981. "It became the most popular message-routing infrastructure for sending e-mail over the Internet, and commercial institutions started coming to Eric looking for support," says John Ore, Sendmail, Inc.'s Director of Product Marketing.

In response to those queries, Allman and Greg Olson formed Sendmail, Inc. in 1998, offering a commercial version of the MTA (message transfer agent) along with technical support and a straightforward user interface. For many users, Ore says, the commercial version quickly became an attractive option. "The open-source version of the MTA, it's sort of a badge of honor if you can figure out how to use it," he says.

Sendmail 1-87-SENDMAIL sales@sendmail.com

The company now offers a Mailstream Manager product which can sit in front of any MTA, including Sendmail's own. "It's a whole suite of routing, security, and content management tools for use on e-mail servers—anti-virus, anti-spam, policy management, connection management—all the stuff you need to protect your e-mail infrastructure on the front end," Ore says.

Mailstream Manager also includes a Flow Control solution, built to help ISPs stop address-harvesting and denial of service attacks. "When you talk about content management and security, everybody talks about anti-spam and anti-virus, which are de facto requirements, but we're also starting to look at connection-level security," Ore says.

In addition, Sendmail's MailCenter product offers everything from POP and IMAP servers to webmail, as well as Intelligent Inbox, an end user personal filtering tool that allows users to control their own anti-spam and anti-virus settings. "When you take it together, Sendmail operates in a very broad spectrum of message management," Ore says.

Time tested
The strongest selling point for the company's offering, Ore says, is its long history. "Our solution has been tested for over 20 years," he says. "The core routing infrastructure that Sendmail offers routes upwards of 60 to 70 percent of all e-mail over the Internet, both the open-source and the commercial version."

Sendmail, Inc.'s Professional Services division can also work with an ISP to customize any aspect of the offering. "Every customer views their e-mail infrastructure as somewhat unique, and their use of e-mail as somewhat unique—and we're completely equipped to handle that," Ore says.

The fact that the company offers a complete solution for ISPs, Ore says, is another strength. "There are a lot of companies that operate in either the Mailstream Manager or the MailCenter space, but typically they don't operate in both," he says. "Customers can come to us for a messaging solution that's pretty comprehensive."

At the same time, each of the products can be run separately, in conjunction with another company's solution. "In an enterprise world where Microsoft Exchange dominates, running Mailstream Manager in front of that is a very common implementation," Ore says.

Prices for the offerings are not published, though Ore says they're cost-effective for a wide range of ISPs. "Typically for an ISP of, say, a million subscribers—which to us is a good-sized ISP but in the marketplace it's not terribly huge—is on the order of less than $10 per user for an entire suite of mailbox, webmail, content management, and routing products," he says.

The company also works with smaller ISPs, particularly affinity offerings, that are just starting up. "We're able to work with them on developing a pay-as-you-grow model so that they can forward-purchase our products at a subscriber volume that they think they're going to hit," Ore says. "We just check in with them and see how they're growing, and we make adjustments on a quarterly basis."

Integrated webmail
Sendmail's current webmail offering provides both a webmail interface and a wireless solution for handheld devices. An enhanced webmail product is in the works that will work with the Intelligent Inbox offering to allow end users to manage their anti-spam and anti-virus rules from the same Web interface they use to manage mail.

The webmail solution can be purchased separately from any of the company's other products, though Ore says most customers choose to buy the complete solution. "You could use our webmail product against another POP and IMAP store, quite frankly, but we just don't have customers doing that," he says.

The online interface can be fully customized for the ISP. "We approach markets overseas as well, and we've localized the interface for different markets," Ore says. "We have service providers overseas in Japan, and we have them in Europe. They like to have a customizable interface, obviously, that reflects both their particular branding and their particular users' language preferences."

Looking ahead, the company has created a new web site at Sendmail.net to document its work in the sender authentication arena. Sendmail is working with both DomainKeys by Yahoo! and the new Sender ID spec, testing them with its own MTA. "That will be a definite value add for ISPs who want to show customers that they're concerned about protecting their e-mail infrastructure," Ore says.

And Sendmail is actively calling for ISP participation in the testing program. "They would be ideal participants, because they've got real-world cases to test and see where signatures break—are their customers going to be able to receive valid, signed e-mail," Ore says. "I think this is going to be really good stuff for ISPs!"

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