If these features are so obviously good, why doesn't every anti-spam product have them?

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 10, 2007]

Based in Surrey, Canada (near Vancouver), Linux Magic has been deploying its MagicMail spam server for years. Back in 2003, it announced DSL Extreme (now part of Ikano Communications) as a major customer.

The MagicMail system can incorporate a significant variety of features (authentication, billing, server clustering, and more), but we spoke to the company's founder about its anti-spam features.

Micheal Peddemors talks about the features as if they're obviously needed, even though not all anti-spam products have them. For example, surely every anti-spam product should reject mail before putting it through a filter? "If 95 percent of your mail is spam, and I accept all of it, then I need 20 times as many servers as I would if I rejected mail."

A combination of reverse DNS lookup, standards conformity, and server reputation, should be sufficient, he says. Users don't have the time to look at e-mail quarantines, tweak e-mail rules, or train a heuristic filter.

Feature list
Features include:

• Sending a "USER DOES NOT EXIST" reply to messages sent to nonexistent addresses.
• Anti-spam and anti-virus enabled on a per-user basis (so you can charge for it)
• Support for user generated blacklists and whitelists that supercede e-mail rejection (so your users can receive mail from senders on non-compliant mail servers)
• Reverse DNS lookup
• Checking standards compliance
• Support for user-generated and ISP-generated rules
• "Ability to set sane defaults easily"
• Message rate limiting, inbound and outbound

This last feature is very important to ISPs, Peddemors says. When a single customer gets infected, they can start transmitting millions of messages. The system shuts that down immediately, and the customer is supposed to fix the problem or call the ISP to get help. The rate limiter will also prevent a user from accidentally sending an e-mail to everyone in their address book, and will sometimes block someone who "wants to share a joke with their 400,000 closest friends."

The ability to set sane defaults easily will appeal to any ISP that has ever filtered all spam by accidentally tagging 100 percent of e-mail as bad.

The guiding philosophy behind the coding, Peddemors says, is simple. "Our parent company, Wizard IT Services, has been providing ISP support services since 1997. We started realizing that there are certain ISP and telco best practices that every ISP should have. MagicMail is a server by ISPs for ISPs."

MagicMail is not a product designed for the enterprise market and sold to ISPs as an afterthought.

The product is designed for ISPs with 1,000 users or more. Peddemors says that smaller ISPs do become customers, but that these days, most of the smallest ISPs are outsourcing their entire e-mail operation, and therefore don't need a mail server.

Pricing and availability
The MagicMail server is available now, starting at $6,795. A system for 10,000 users, with clustering features, might be $11,000 or $12,000. A fully integrated system with billing and authentication and other features, with full redundancy for 250,000 users would be around $30,000.

An open source SMTP daemon (that supports many mail servers but was originally designed for qmail), the magic-smtpd, is also available. Peddemors says that he loves the business and the people he works with, and adds that his company would never have been able to develop the product without the full support of the Linux community. "It's easier to develop on open source," he says.

—End