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.

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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.