SearchSecurity.com: Small email security vendors thrive in saturated market

By Robert Westervelt, News Editor
11 Jun 2008 | SearchSecurity.com

Spam almost brought the servers of AlaWeb Pioneer Services to a grinding halt, according to Hugh Messenger, senior network administrator at AlaWeb. The ISP, serving business and residential customers in Alabama and Florida, was flooded with thousands of connections, slowing customer messages and even blocking some legitimate inbound messages.

We're tracking 18 major vendors that make up 90% of the market.
Peter Firstbrook,
research director, Gartner Inc.

"We probably never got more than 200,000 genuine emails a day," Messenger said. "We went from processing that to processing 2 to 3 million spam messages a day."

Companies like AlaWeb are using specialty vendors to reduce spam and control targeted phishing attacks, but industry analysts say larger vendors with more feature sets will dominate the email security market. Buying trends are consolidating around the biggest vendors, but some specialty vendors are surviving.

"We're tracking 18 major vendors that make up 90% of the market," said Peter Firstbrook, a research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. "It's a saturated market right now."

The highly competitive market is taking a toll on some vendors. Redwood City, Calif.-based Tumbleweed expanded its email security products in 2004 with email firewall, antispam and antivirus appliances. Last week, Axway, an EDI network-based managed file transfer software vendor, announced a merger with Tumbleweed. Firstbrook said Tumbleweed had been steadily losing market share.

Joe Fisher, Tumbleweed's executive vice president of product management, called the market commoditized, and said Tumbleweed changed its strategy to focus on outbound email encryption and managed file transfers.

Functionality, such as data leakage prevention, encryption, antispam, antivirus, and email routing and management are converging to an appliance or services based platform, Firstbrook said.

Small and midsize businesses are turning toward managed services to handle email security. It's a market led by Cisco Systems, Google-Postini, Symantec, Trend Micro, MessageLabs and Microsoft, according to Gartner's Firstbrook.

MailChannels Corp., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is one player that found a niche in the antispam market. AlaWeb is using MailChannels' Traffic Control software to create a reputation score and slow low-scoring connections during email processing to turn away spammers. MailChannels recently added support of Apache SpamAssassin for Traffic Control users. The company says Traffic Control filters out about 85% of spam, reducing load handling issues. MailChannels is making Traffic Control available for free for low-volume use, less than 10,000 connections a day.

Michael D. Osterman, president and principal analyst of Osterman Research Inc. said a number of vendors offer reputation systems, including IronPort, Commtouch and Secure Computing.

"By blocking most of the traffic before it reaches the corporate network, CPU cycles are saved since blocking based on reputation is much less CPU-intensive than content filtering," Osterman said.

AlaWeb's Messenger said there is some fine tuning that needs to be done to Traffic Control to eliminate false positives. AlaWeb typically places a few users each day on a white list so their messages get through the filter, he said.

"The beauty of a product like Traffic Control is that it can be easily installed and act like a proxy to eliminate a large number of spam toting inbound connections," Messenger said.

When a spammer attempts to connect from a server to send unwanted email, the throttler lets them connect at a slow speed, keeping data flowing at only a few bytes a second. Spamming software senses the slow connection and closes it to find another ISP to serve up the messages.

Like other niche players in the email security market, MailChannels' technology could be acquired by a larger vendor, Osterman said.

"They have good technology," he said. "It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft buy them, for example, although I have not heard anything along those lines."

MailChannels' Financial Support Helps Apache SpamAssassin Community by Enabling More Scalable "Honey Pots"

Putting spam traps onto Amazon EC2 will help boost the accuracy of SpamAssassin rules

Vancouver, Canada (PRWEB) June 5, 2008 -- MailChannels Corporation, the global leader in email traffic shaping software, today announced that it is paying for infrastructure to host the Apache SpamAssassin project's spam honey pots. Support of this project enables the Apache SpamAssassin project to increase the number of honey pots it hosts, leading to better and more timely data on global spam outbreaks.

"We're grateful for MailChannels' continued support of the SpamAssassin project," said Justin Mason, Chairman of the Apache SpamAssassin Project Management Committee. "Forward-thinking companies like MailChannels are proving that through collaboration and community involvement, SpamAssassin can continue to provide world-class spam filtering for organizations of all sizes. The Apache SpamAssassin honey pots provide a test-bed for spam filter rules that serve an estimated 100 million SpamAssassin users worldwide."

MailChannels and Mason found an opportunity to help each other. In return for paying the hosting costs, the company will be able to share in the live data generated to provide a realistic test-bed for its new anti-spam technologies.

The support of the honey pots is the latest example of MailChannels' strong belief that SpamAssassin can provide a highly-effective foundation for enterprise spam defenses. MailChannels is committed to supporting open source projects with technical and financial assistance, and with add-on proprietary products that enhance the functionality of the open source platforms.

MailChannels recently announced a commercial-grade, proprietary email traffic shaping solution for SpamAssassin that enables enterprise IT to dramatically improve the effectiveness of SpamAssassin. More information on the new solution can be found at http://www.mailchannels.com

About Apache SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a mature, widely-deployed open source project that serves as a mail filter to identify spam. SpamAssassin uses a variety of mechanisms including header and text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases. SpamAssassin runs on a server, and filters spam before it reaches your mailbox. Read more about it at http://spamassassin.apache.org.

About the Apache Software Foundation
SpamAssassin is an Apache Software Foundation project and is released under the Apache License. The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. As a US 501(c)(3) public charity, the Foundation provides an established framework for contributions of both intellectual property and funding for the support of open source software development. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products for the public benefit, attracting large communities of users and enabling future innovation, both commercial and individual, through its pragmatic Apache License.
Read more about it at http://www.apache.org.

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.

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