quietlife.net

Swirbo

14 Oct 2004

Well, the reason I’ve been remiss in posting is because I’ve been neglecting it in favor of another: Swirbo, my new spam and virus filtering service was launched with much fanfare this week.

Briefly, Swirbo is a service for filtering spam and viruses. Unlike most spam and virus-filtering solutions, it’s not software you install on your PC, and it doesn’t involve hardware at your physical location. Your domain name’s mail is simply routed, via its MX records, to our service, where it’s cleaned of spam and viruses before being delivered to your final destination mailserver.

Because of this, obviously, it’s only an option if you have control over your domain and want to protect it entirely. (But, stay tuned for a future product designed more towards individual e-mail boxes.)

A brief list of features and functionality:

  • Suspected spam and viruses are quarantined on our servers for future review, not deleted, so even false positives are never truly lost.
  • A user-friendly web interface for reviewing and verifying both quarantined mail and viruses, with account and domain-specific settings (and inheritance), white and black lists, customizable thresholds and actions.
  • A host of spam-fighting measures, including, among others:
    • Bayesian statistical analysis and training
    • Multiple public and proprietary blacklists (DNS RBLs, RHSBLs, et al.)
    • Checksum clearinghouses
    • Greylisting
    • SMTP Adherence limitations
  • Virus filtering, protecting against over 25,000 signatures, updated every hour. The recent JPEG comment exploit was detected and quarantined on our system no later than the morning it was first spotted in the wild.

And some quick numbers:

  • Over 99% catch-rate, 0.02% false positive rate.
  • On average, 60-70% of all mail (yes, all mail) is rejected off the bat as spam because of blacklists of SMTP violations. Further, another 20% of the remainder is quarantined as spam or viruses after that. This translates to a tremendous savings in bandwidth and server processing load because of mail that never hits your mailserver

Be sure to check out Swirbo’s new website, and if you’re interested, definitely sign up for a Free Trial.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled lack of posting.