By David Hamilton, Web Host Industry Review, June 15, 2009
MailChannels CEO Ken Simpson at the WHIR networking lounge at HostingCon 2008.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Email traffic shaping software provider MailChannels (www.mailchannels.com) has substantially increased the capacity and performance of its email security add-on, Traffic Control, an Nginx-based, light-weight solution able to support millions of email accounts on a single CPU.
According to MailChannels' Monday announcement, Traffic Control 4.0 can reduce server costs by as much as 95 percent with its efficient spam pre-filtering, which eliminates messages before they hit an organization's mail server.
"The rationale is simple: less spam traffic means less hardware required for our customers - saving them millions of dollars annually," MailChannels chief executive officer Ken Simpson said in a statement. "In the past, increasing spam volume meant adding costly new hardware. Nginx was a logical foundation because of its lightning speed and very low memory footprint."
Because of its light weight and high-performance, Traffic Control 4.0 is built on top of web server platform Nginx, one of the most reliable and efficient web servers. Its Nginx core helps Traffic Control protect entire enterprises and service providers using as little as one server. Traffic Control is able to process 10 million messages per hour on a single CPU - 10 times faster than a standard mail transfer agent.
Also, by shaping email traffic at the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol level, MailChannels' technology decreases the volume of inbound spam that service providers need to manage. It separates senders into three categories, which can be thought of as the good, the bad and the ugly. Good senders have their messages expediated, bad senders are blocked, and new, unknown senders are are restricted in bandwidth down to a few bytes per second.
MailChannel's traffic shaping forces 99.6 percent of spammers to drop off, without negatively affecting legitimate senders.
"By shaping email traffic at the SMTP level, abusive senders and legitimate senders are no longer competing for network resources, so our customers' networks are not distracted by unwanted email," Simpson said in a statement.
Traffic Control 4.0 can also integrate with existing carrier-grade spam filtering technology from Cloudmark, Commtouch, and others, and is scalable from a single server all the way up to clusters of messaging servers.
MailChannels also plans to contribute back to the Nginx open source community, which has helped it achieve its spam blocking goals.
A number of web hosts implement Traffic Control for email filtering. For instance, hosting provider SherWeb (www.sherweb.com) upgraded its anti-spam service with Traffic Control in January, bolstering its Hosted Exchange accounts with improved spam filtering and service reliability with no additional fees for customers.
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