Coming soon: A spam ban in a can

By Paul McNamara
Network World Fusion, 3/2/98

Colorado Springs - Looking for a way to block up to 95% of spam you are assaulted with every day? A new antispam device coming this month from Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI) just may be the ticket.

[Spam fighting graphic] The company's BSDI Mail Filter sits on a corporate Internet access link between the firewall and e-mail servers and picks off junk messages.

The box will give companies a single point of control over antispam efforts. Existing spam filters reside on every firewall, e-mail server or client, and can be tedious to maintain, especially in heterogenous environments.

BSDI will also offer a subscription service that will automatically update the device over the Internet, adding addresses of newly detected spammers and fresh filtering intelligence.

The box works with any Simple Mail Transfer Protocol-enabled e-mail server and is easier to install, configure and keep loaded with the latest antispam measures than other filters on the market, according to Rob Kolstad, CEO of BSDI.

"We believe that people want to buy single-function boxes that nail a problem," Kolstad said. "[The Mail Filter] is just a box; no monitor or keyboard."

Expected to ship later this month, Mail Filter will be marketed to corporate users and Internet service providers.

Using a variety of filtering techniques, the device examines e-mail headers looking for known spammers and telltale signs of forged addresses.

Mail Filter can be configured from a Web browser to either tag suspected spam and queue it for eyeball analysis, or to reject the message outright, in which case the sender receives notification.

Those familiar with BSDI's plan last week offered mixed reactions. "On paper, [the Mail Filter] looks great," said Scott Chasin, chief technology officer at USA.net, a Web-based e-mail provider with 3.1 million subscribers, based here. Chasin said he is anxious to install a beta version of the device.

Mail Filters cross-platform compatibility, ease of installation and hands-off administration should appeal to users, provided the appliance performs as advertised, Chasin added.

However, Paul Hoffman, director of the Internet Mail Consortium, has long been critical of spam remedies that rely on filtering mail at the server. Nothing about his understanding of the BSDI device has changed that view.

"The biggest problem with server-side filtering is that it can easily lose business messages, depending on how the filters act," Hoffman said.

BSDI CEO Kolstad countered that concerns about filters generating "false positives" are overblown and that his company's new product is equipped with safeguards.

"Of the thousands and thousands of mail messages we have checked [at BSDI] in the past 40 days, we got one false positive, and that person was notified that their mail was not delivered," Kolstad said.

He anticipates that the subscription service will be particularly attractive to network administrators who don't have the time to keep abreast of the latest antispam measures.

"As soon as we know there is a spam site out there, your box will be updated within 10 minutes," Kolstad said.

The BSDI Mail Filter will come in two forms - one that the company says will handle 25,000 to 50,000 messages per hour, and a second that can handle in excess of 100,000 messages per hour. The devices are expected to cost about $6,000 and $10,000, respectively.