First IPv6 Spam Message Caught in the Wild

Greg Troxel reported on the SpamAssassin users mailing list today that he had received the first spam message sent via IPv6 (the successor to IPv4, the Internet Protocol addressing system).

The anti spam community is very concerned about IPv6 because its enormous address space will enable spammers to have access to a virtually unlimited number of IP addresses, rendering traditional "black lists" obsolete. When spammers start sending through IPv6 in earnest, receivers will have to rely on reputation-based whitelisting, treating new IPv6 addresses with a great deal of suspicion until they establish themselves to be trustworthy.

Could this be the end of Spamhaus and other venerable blacklists? Not so fast. It will take decades for IPv4 to be phased out in favour of the new standard. And until that happens, blocking will remain an indispensable technique for stopping spam.

The raw message looks like this (Link):

Return-Path: 
X-Spam-DCC: _DCCB_:_DCCR
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (2008-06-10) on fnord.ir.bbn.com
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-4.8 required=1.0 tests=ALL_TRUSTED,AWL,BAYES_95,
 DATE_IN_PAST_12_24,TVD_PH_SUBJ_META autolearn=no version=3.2.5
X-Original-To: gdt@ir.bbn.com
Delivered-To: gdt@ir.bbn.com
Received: from vilab.hit.edu.cn (unknown [IPv6:2001:da8:b800:228:5054:abff:fe10:8e4c])
 (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits))
 (No client certificate requested)
 by fnord.ir.bbn.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 86A4C5489
 for ; Sun,  3 Jan 2010 22:17:03 -0500 (EST)
Received: from vilab.hit.edu.cn (localhost [127.0.0.1])
 by vilab.hit.edu.cn (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8BEF2B10DE1;
 Sun,  3 Jan 2010 21:59:27 +0800 (CST)
From: "UN-HABITAT" 
Reply-To: ups.deliveryservice@hotmail.com
Subject: Notice
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 21:59:27 +0800
Message-Id: <20100103125409.M77170@vilab.hit.edu.cn>
X-Mailer: OpenWebMail 2.53-B2D 
X-OriginatingIP: 78.138.3.236 (jcsun)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
 charset=utf-8
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.2.3 (fnord.ir.bbn.com [0.0.0.0]); Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:17:05 -0500 (EST)

Your Attention,

After several attempt to reach you, I deemed it necessary and urgent to
contact you with your email and to notify you finally about the
outstanding settlement of your compensation which is being given out by
the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. This compensation is being
made to all victims that have lost their money through any online
transactions or as a result of Scam activities. It has come to our notice
that many of you have lost your money by falling victim to some internet
fraudsters.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT, is the United
Nations agency for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General
Assembly to promote humanly, socially and environmentally with the goal of
providing adequate shelter for all.

As a result of this scam activities spreading over the internet, the
United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT have decided to get
details of most victims who were previously scammed by these fraudsters.

This Human Settlements Programme is design to compensate every one of you
with the sum of $500,000.00 USD to help settle all your debts and start a
new business.

We have concluded all the necessary arrangements towards the release of
your settlement Check sum of $500,000.00 USD with the financial committee
of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in collaboration with
the United Parcel Service LTD (UPS) Nigeria, to deliver the check sum of
$500,000.00 USD which is registered with Ref No: UN014-0157/UPS-UN-HABITAT
to your Compensation Check Parcel.

You are therefore to contact the United Parcel Service LTD (UPS) Nigeria,
with the below information in order to claim your compensation check. Take

note that we have not pay for the shipment of your Check Parcel as  you
will be required to pay the shipping/handling charges for your
compensation check to be deliverd to you.

You are required to contact the UPS Courier Service with the below
information

Name:
Delivery Address:
Direct Phone number:
Sex:
Country:

=================================
United Parcel Service Nigeria LTD
Plot 781 Emeka Anyaoku Street
Area Eleven Garki
FCT-Abuja
Nigeria.
Tel: +234-813-643-9535
Email: ups.deliveryservice@hotmail.com
=================================

Accept our regards.

Higgins A. Denise
UN-HABITAT Information Office

DedicatedNOW Partners with MailChannels to Combat Email Spam and Provide Premium Email Security to Customers

DedicatedNOW's announces a partnership with MailChannels to reduce spams and improve email delivery service for its hosting customers.

Clifton, NJ (PRESS RELEASE) September 6, 2009 - DedicatedNOW, a leading managed dedicated server hosting company, announced today a new partnership with MailChannels, a carrier-grade spam pre-filter that cuts email traffic volume by up to 95% before it hits your existing anti-spam infrastructure. The DedicatedNOW and MailChannels partnership will enhance email delivery times for hosting customers while reducing unsolicited emails from spammers.

"Our partnership with MailChannels will drastically improve the speed of inbound mail filtering by utilizing email traffic shaping technology provided by the MailChannels Traffic Control security product," said Josh Ewin, Director of Sales and Marketing at DedicatedNOW. "The result is a dramatic reduction in spam volume as well as a reduction in email infrastructure costs."

MailChannels has conducted in-depth research on spam behavior, discovering a critical behavioral aspect of spammers; specifically that the average spammer will only wait 5 seconds for successful delivery of an email (as opposed to an average of 6 minutes for a legitimate email). Delaying email delivery by a few more seconds causes spammers to give up on mail delivery.

"We applaud DedicatedNOW's proactive approach to ensuring a faster, more reliable messaging experience for their customers," said Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels. "Traffic Control's patent-pending real-time SMTP multiplexing technology lets more email to be processed simultaneously, thus allowing MailChannels traffic shaping to work, and mail transfer agents (MTAs) to withstand larger email floods without being overwhelmed."

With Traffic Control in place, spamming software ultimately gives up on sending unsolicited emails. Spammers are too impatient to wait for a slow or unresponsive server because spammers do not make money if the unsolicited email is not delivered. The technology provided by MailChannels uses a network of participating customers to determine the trustworthiness of
senders based on delivery times and protocol compliance. More information is available at
http://mailchannels.com/video/introduction-to-mailchannels.html.

"DedicatedNOW customers want their email delivered as quickly as possible without spam emails," said Ewin. "By offering this new layer of anti-spam protection, our dedicated hosting customers will enjoy a more efficient and productive email experience."

About DedicatedNOW
DedicatedNOW, Inc. is a privately owned, multi-million dollar corporation located in Clifton, New Jersey and founded in 1997. DedicatedNOW provides managed and unmanaged dedicated web hosting services to thousands of satisfied customers. DedicatedNOW delivers cutting-edge hosting solutions to meet the requirements of small and medium sized businesses, large scale corporations, and individuals. Customers rely on DedicatedNOW for reliable, secure and value-rich services such as dedicated servers, managed hosting, complex hosting, cloud hosting, reseller and colocation hosting.

DedicatedNOW's servers are located in a state of the art data center in Clifton, New Jersey. At present, the data center incorporates more than 7,500 sq ft of raised floor space. In addition, DedicatedNOW boasts over 5,000 sq ft of corporate office space comprising of conference rooms, reception area, staff facilities, etc.
For more information about DedicatedNOW, visit http://www.dedicatednow.com.

Media Contact:
Josh Ewin
Director of Sales & Marketing
DedicatedNOW
1 (973) 572-1078
jewin@fortressitx.com

About MailChannels

MailChannels is a leading provider of email traffic shaping software, helping service providers control escalating costs brought on by rapid growth. The company's Traffic Control software presorts incoming email before it hits your network, prioritizing the delivery of legitimate email while slowing down and blocking spam traffic to reduce downstream server load. Recognized by Red Herring Canada Top 50 and the MIT Spam Conference, MailChannels protects Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers and universities worldwide.

For more information MailChannels, visit http://www.mailchannels.com.

Media Contact:
Desmond Liao
MailChannels Corporation
1 (888) 685-7488 x 503
Communications@mailchannels.com

Web Host Industry Review: MailChannels Upgrades Spam Defense

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.

MailChannels Announces Traffic Control 4.0 Email Security

A Lightweight High-Performance Solution Based on Nginx That Supports Millions Of Email Users On A Single CPU

San Francisco, CA - June 15, 2009 - MailChannels, a leading provider of email traffic shaping software, today announced that it has substantially increased the capacity and performance of its email security add-on with the launch of Traffic Control™ 4.0. One of the key benefits of using Traffic Control is that it efficiently pre-filters spam before it hits an organization’s mail server, reducing server costs by up to 95%. Leading service providers rely on the technology to streamline their email architecture and save money.

Version 4.0 of Traffic Control implements MailChannels’ innovative and effective traffic shaping technology on top of Nginx (pronounced “engine-x”), a lightweight, high-performance web server platform which is touted for its reliability and low resource consumption. Nginx is currently one of the fastest growing web servers on the planet, according to data published by the web site tracking firm NetCraft.

Nginx was chosen because of its compact and high performance design. Traffic Control 4.0 is built on the same high performance foundation as Nginx, enabling large organizations and service providers to protect millions of users from spam using as little as one server. This is welcome news for service providers under the current recessionary economic conditions because it enables an immediate cost savings by eliminating costly email security servers.

“The rationale is simple: less spam traffic means less hardware required for our customers – saving them millions of dollars annually. In the past, increasing spam volume meant adding costly new hardware,” said Ken Simpson, CEO at MailChannels. “Nginx was a logical foundation because of its lightning speed and very low memory footprint.”

MailChannels’ technology shapes email traffic at the SMTP (Application) level, decreasing the volume of inbound spam that service providers need to manage. It separates senders into three distinct categories: bad senders are blocked, good senders are expedited for delivery, and new, unknown senders are restricted in bandwidth down to a few bytes per second. This traffic shaping forces 99.6% 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,” said Ken.

MailChannels plans to contribute a number of improvements back to the Nginx open source community.

NEWS FACTS – Traffic Control 4.0:
• Processes 10 million messages per hour on a single CPU (10x faster than a standard MTA). An ISP with 3 million users could process all of their email traffic on just one server.
• Scales in all directions: from a single server all the way up to clusters of messaging servers.
• Integrates with existing carrier-grade spam filtering technology from Cloudmark, Commtouch, and others: By combining Traffic Control 4.0’s effective traffic shaping with accurate content filtering, service providers benefit from substantial cost savings.

About Nginx
Nginx is an open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Written by Igor Sysoev in 2005, Nginx now hosts 3% of the world’s web sites and has a fast growing user base. Nginx is known for its speed, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn't rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but most importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load. Nginx powers several high-visibility sites, such as WordPress, Hulu, and TorrentReactor.

About MailChannels
MailChannels is a leading provider of email traffic shaping software, helping service providers control escalating costs brought on by rapid growth. The company’s Traffic Control software presorts incoming email before it hits your network, prioritizing the delivery of legitimate email while slowing down and blocking spam traffic to reduce downstream server load. Recognized by Red Herring Canada Top 50 and the MIT Spam Conference, MailChannels protects Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers and universities worldwide.
For more information, visit www.mailchannels.com.

###

Media Contact: Desmond Liao, MailChannels Corporation at communications@mailchannels.com

Phone +1 (888) 685-7488

MailChannels and Commtouch to Bring Premium Spam Filtering to Parallels Plesk Panel

MailChannels integrates email traffic shaping with Commtouch filtering technology to create a powerful new anti-spam solution for the hosting industry

Vancouver, Canada, February 2, 2009 –MailChannels announced today the signing of a new agreement with Commtouch® (Nasdaq: CTCH), a leading provider of messaging and Web security technology. This new licensing agreement will give Parallels Plesk users one-click access to MailChannels‘ powerful email traffic management technology while leveraging Commtouch’s real-time filters that consistently exceed 98 percent accuracy.

“More than 10 million users worldwide count on Parallels Plesk Panel to deliver their email safely and reliably,” said Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels. “And today, very few of these users are benefiting from the best available anti-spam technology. MailChannels and Commtouch are pleased to offer the best available protection to this underserved user community.”

On February 2, at the Parallels Summit in Las Vegas, MailChannels plans to release a new plug-in for Parallels Plesk Panel that will combine MailChannels’ innovative and highly effective email traffic shaping technology with Commtouch’s proven Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD™) based spam filtering, Zero-Hour™ Virus Outbreak Protection and GlobalView™ Mail Reputation technologies. Parallels Plesk administrators will be able to install the plug-in component in seconds from within Parallels Plesk Panel’s flexible configuration interface.

A video of the installation process can be viewed at
http://tcblog.mailchannels.com/2008/11/direct-from-mailchannels-labs-plesk.html.

“Combining traffic shaping with three layers of Commtouch messaging security technology represents an architectural change that severely inhibits spammers and malware distributors from abusing end users,” added Amir Lev, Commtouch’s chief technology officer. “We are pleased to work with MailChannels to provide this enhanced solution for protecting networks and inboxes.”

The initial release of Traffic Control for Parallels Plesk Panel is available at http://www.mailchannels.com/download/parallels.

MailChannels is a proud sponsor of the Parallels Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 2-4, 2009 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. To attend, register at http://www.parallels.com/summit.

About MailChannels
MailChannels Corporation is the global leader in email traffic shaping technology, helping to relieve service providers of rising email operation costs. The company’s Traffic Control software presorts incoming email before it hits your network, controlling traffic to prevent server congestion and system slowdowns so that email servers can run at optimal performance. Recognized by Red Herring Canada Top 50 and the MIT Spam Conference, MailChannels protects Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers and universities worldwide. For more information, visit: http://www.mailchannels.com and the Anti-Spam Blog at http://blog.mailchannels.com.

About Commtouch
Commtouch® (NASDAQ: CTCH) is the source of proven messaging and Web security technology for scores of security companies and service providers, founded on a unique cloud-based datacenter approach. Commtouch’s expertise in building efficient, massive-scale security services has resulted in its patented technology mitigating Internet threats for thousands of organizations and hundreds of millions of users in more than 100 countries. Commtouch technology automatically analyzes billions of Internet transactions in real-time to identify new threats as they are initiated, protecting email infrastructures and enabling safe, compliant browsing. The unmatched suite of Commtouch security offerings is based on patented Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD™) and GlobalView™ technologies, which work together in a comprehensive feedback loop and offer equally effective protection for all languages and formats. Commtouch was founded in 1991, is headquartered in Netanya, Israel, and has a subsidiary in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Stay abreast of the latest at the Commtouch Café: http://blog.commtouch.com. For more information about enhancing security offerings with Commtouch technology, see www.commtouch.com or write nospam@commtouch.com.

Recurrent Pattern Detection, RPD, Zero-Hour and GlobalView are trademarks, and Commtouch is a registered trademark, of Commtouch Software Ltd. U.S. Patent No. 6,330,590 is owned by Commtouch.

###

Media Contact: Desmond Liao, MailChannels Corporation at communications@mailchannels.com

Phone +1 (888) 685-7488

Sherweb Deploys MailChannels Traffic Control to Add Carrier-Grade Email Management Technology

Leading Microsoft Hosted Exchange provider upgrades anti-spam service to stop spam and reduce load at the perimeter

Vancouver, Canada, January 14, 2009 – Email security software provider, MailChannels, announced today that SherWeb, a global Microsoft Exchange provider, has successfully deployed MailChannels' Traffic Control software to further improve the reliability and cost-effectiveness of its Microsoft Exchange hosting environment. Traffic Control eliminates abusive email by applying MailChannels‘ patent-pending email traffic shaping technology, cutting the load on downstream email infrastructure while ensuring end-users see less spam in their inboxes and junk folders.

Traffic Control is available at http://www.mailchannels.com/download .

Hosted email providers like SherWeb face special challenges when it comes to providing reliable, spam-free email service. Customers demand a rich set of CPU-intensive email handling features and the lowest possible pricing. Meanwhile, increasing levels of spam put pressure on email infrastructure, threatening service reliability and driving up operating costs. Providers are constantly challenged by the need to balance features with cost effectiveness. And anti-spam performance is a key indicator of a provider’s success in the market.

With their fast-growing user base, SherWeb’s spam problem had recently grown to the point where a major investment in new email filtering infrastructure was required. SherWeb investigated a number of potential solutions including RBLs and grey-listing, but in the end decided that MailChannels' patent-pending email traffic shaping technology was technically superior.

“With today’s increasing spam problems, remaining proactive and finding only the best solutions and alternatives are crucial. Since meeting customer needs is our priority, outsourcing to a third party that specializes in email traffic shaping solutions is fundamental to maintain our high business standards,” stated Peter Cassar, CEO and President of SherWeb.

“We are pleased to bring SherWeb users the same carrier-grade email traffic management technology that we have deployed at major institutions such as Wyeth, PG&E, and Cornell University.” said Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels. “We welcome partnerships like SherWeb, who place a strong emphasis on the cost-effective delivery of reliable email service.“

MailChannels helps companies avoid rising infrastructure costs of hosting email despite increasing spam volume. Instead of relying on a hard pass or fail system like spam blocking, the MailChannels system stops spammers by prioritizing the mail queue so that legitimate senders are expedited delivery while spammers are put in a holding pattern. Traffic Control performs like an email load balancer, by selectively restricting the bandwidth of unidentified senders. This results in dramatic infrastructure savings by stopping spam at the initial connection.

About SherWeb
Founded in 1998, SherWeb is a leader in Internet hosting solutions and provides shared Web hosting services, dedicated servers and hosted messaging and collaboration systems. The company is currently serving thousands of customers in more than 25 countries around the world. SherWeb’s hosting solutions are modular and scalable in order to ensure that customers can grow their businesses without having to invest additional time, capital or other resources into their Web and messaging infrastructure.
For more information, visit http://www.sherweb.com .

About MailChannels
MailChannels Corporation is the global leader in email traffic shaping technology, helping to relieve service providers of rising email operation costs. The company’s Traffic Control software presorts incoming email before it hits your network, controlling traffic to prevent server congestion and system slowdowns so that email servers can run at optimal performance. Recognized by Red Herring Canada Top 50 and the MIT Spam Conference, MailChannels protects Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers and universities worldwide.
For more information, visit: http://www.mailchannels.com and the Anti-Spam Blog at http://blog.mailchannels.com .

###

Media Contact: Desmond Liao, MailChannels Corporation at communications@mailchannels.com

Phone +1 (888) 685-7488

MailChannels Honored by Red Herring Canada Top 50 Selection

Award Recognizes the Top 50 Canadian Firms Delivering Innovation

Vancouver, Canada, September 22, 2008 -- MailChannels Corporation, the global leader in email traffic shaping software, today announced its inclusion into the Red Herring Canada 2008 Top 50, a selection of Canada's most innovative and promising companies. Inclusion in Red Herring's list comes just eighteen months after MailChannels was recognized by the MIT Spam Conference, after introducing its ground-breaking anti-spam technology and winning the "Best Paper" award.

"Red Herring is a respected authority on business and technology innovation," said Ken Simpson, MailChannels Co-Founder and CEO. "We are honored to have been selected by such a forward thinking group. When we started MailChannels four years ago, people said we were crazy for entering the saturated anti-spam market, but as Red Herring has shown today, there is clearly always room for innovation."

Companies nominated for the Red Herring Canada 2008 Top 50 Award must be privately owned, have their headquarters in Canada and have a technology, clean-tech or life sciences focus. In addition, a qualifying company must possess a disruptive technology or process with significant market potential.

The announcement was made last week at Red Herring's Canada 2008 event, held in Mont-Tremblant, Québec. The conference featured two days of keynote presentations and roundtable discussions from notable speakers, with topics including finding funding in a turbulent market, Web 3.0, the future of digital media and shifting VC activity. Attendees included leading technology innovators from Canada; national and international venture capitalists and financiers senior executives; technology investors; and government agencies.

MailChannels has developed a highly effective email security technology that stops spam by slowing down suspicious and unknown senders, allowing service providers and large enterprises to cut up to 90% more spam at the network edge than incumbent solutions. By stopping more spam at the edge, Traffic Control reduces email server load, improving reliability and reducing infrastructure costs. MailChannels' customers include pharmaceutical giant Wyeth, California electric utility Pacific Gas & Electric, and leading universities including Cornell.

Traffic Control is available at http://www.mailchannels.com/download/.

About MailChannels
MailChannels Corporation is the global leader in email traffic shaping software, providing the most effective protocol-layer spam filtering to email receivers of all sizes. The company's flagship product, Traffic Control, combines an ultra efficient multiplexing SMTP proxy with real-time reputation data to prioritize email traffic before it hits the mail server. MailChannels Traffic Control protects email users at Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers, and universities worldwide. Recognized by Red Herring Canada Top 50 and the MIT Spam Conference, MailChannels is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. For more information, visit www.mailchannels.com.

About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world's best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology research, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider's access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.

###

Media Contact: Desmond Liao, MailChannels Corporation at communications@mailchannels.com
Phone +1 (888) 685-7488

Red Herring selects MailChannels as a finalist in the Red Herring Canada Top 50

Vancouver, Canada, August 29, 2008 -- MailChannels, the global leader in email traffic shaping software, announced today that it has been named a finalist for the Red Herring Canada 2008 Top 50 Awards to celebrate Canadian technology and innovation. More than 250 Canadian technology companies, venture capitalists, business development partners from large companies, and other startups will convene in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, where the winners will be announced September 15-17, 2008.

Red Herring's Top 50 event chronicles Canada’s rapid ascent as a global technology leader and will feature dynamic and inspiring discussions by top innovators, decision-makers, and key players from technology and venture capital companies. A special issue of Red Herring magazine will feature the 50 winning companies and a program will also be run on Red Herring TV.

The Red Herring editorial staff evaluated several hundred private companies and selected the best of the best for their awards. Companies like Google, eBay, Skype, Salesforce.com, and YouTube were spotted in their early days by Red Herring editors, and touted as leaders that would change the way we live and work.

With the addition, MailChannels is being recognized for bringing to market and successfully driving adoption of its innovative email security technology. Traffic Control is a software product that substantially reduces spam traffic and email server load by slowing down traffic from suspicious sources. Leading companies and institutions including pharmaceutical giant Wyeth, electric utility Pacific Gas & Electric, and Ivy League university Cornell University have deployed Traffic Control to improve the service quality and reliability of email.

Traffic Control is available at http://www.mailchannels.com/download/.

About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world's best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology research, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider's access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.

About MailChannels
MailChannels Corporation is the global leader in email traffic shaping software, providing the most effective protocol-layer spam filtering to email receivers of all sizes. The company's flagship product, Traffic Control, combines an ultra efficient multiplexing SMTP proxy with real-time reputation data to prioritize email traffic before it hits the mail server. MailChannels Traffic Control protects email users at Fortune 500 companies, leading service providers, and universities worldwide. Recognized by the MIT Spam Conference and other leading authorities on spam, MailChannels is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. For more information, visit www.mailchannels.com.

###

Media Contact: Desmond Liao, MailChannels Corporation at communications@mailchannels.com
Phone +1 (888) 685-7488

MailChannels Makes the Most of HostingCon

by Liam Eagle
Web Host Industry Review blog
View the full article

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I-ll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Normally I'm not one for hosting conference swag. I already have a stack of memory sticks I don't use, and enough t-shirts to go jogging every day from now to eternity without doing laundry (note: this is a slight exaggeration).

But when I stopped by the MailChannels booth at HostingCon last week to set up an interview with CEO Ken Simpson, I was surprised to find myself coveting their swag. I filled out a quick survey, and I walked away with one of these. The WHIR office is now considerably more rad.

MailChannels showed up at HostingCon with a veritable armory of Nerf weapons, and they were a hit - gone long before the show ended. As it turns out, this was one part of a confluence of facts that enabled the company to walk away from the conference with considerably more interested that it had expected.

According to Simpson, MailChannels- Traffic Control product was never designed as a product for the hosting business. He says a customer with a deep understanding of the anti-spam market got in touch with him, and let him know that the product was "perfect for hosts."

The Traffic Control solution uses "traffic shaping," which prioritizes and slows down suspicious traffic before it reaches the mail server. Some of the results of this is that bot-nets attempting to deliver spam tend to move on from the slow or unresponsive connections, and the slow-down gives more traditional filtering technologies more time to react, which massively lightens the mostly-spam workload of email servers.

I'll get more into the technical aspect of the application in an upcoming WHIR feature (and there's plenty of information - and a download link - on the MailChannels site), but some of the effects are massive reductions in the amount of email server hardware required, and (for hosts) enormous drops in the volume of support calls received about email and particularly spam.

This was enough to generate genuine interest from just about every hosting provider that stopped by the booth, according to Simpson. And on top of that he had a more hosting-oriented revenue-sharing model devised for hosts that want to incorporate the service as more of a paid-for offering to customers.

Assuming they threw away my survey (me being useless to MailChannels as a sales lead), they still walked away from HostingCon with something in the vicinity of 300 solid leads, said Simpson. And that, out of a field of roughly 1,500 attendees, was much more than satisfactory.

Apparently a very big stack of excellent swag and a genuinely intriguing proposition are a recipe for a successful HostingCon. Hopefully that-ll lead to the availability of more excellent stuff in years to come.

Also, by way of a further update, apparently the Nerf-related promotions aren't over for the company, which sent out an email last week following up. According to MailChannels, you can upgrade your "spam cannon" (which was how they were describing the toys they were giving away) to a THIS, via a couple of methods.

One of those methods was "attend a webinar next Wednesday at 12pm Eastern," which is my real reason for discussing the email.

That "Wednesday" it mentions is tomorrow. Sorry for the short notice, but if you-re interested in MailChannels or Traffic Control you still have time to check it out.

Putting the lid on spam

by David Pye
Globe and Mail: Print Edition
Read the full article