Originally published on 06/27/2002

I have bad timing. In a sidebar comment on June 10, I asked readers if they would prefer I deliver my column during the day, so it wouldn't be "buried in the middle of the overnight delivery of Viagra ads." Ironically, one of the systems that I receive email on had just started using SpamAssassin, and the Viagra reference (and other factors in my column's formatting) caused the system to flag Catch of the Day as probable junk mail.

This is one of the weaknesses with most anti-spam technologies: they are good at identifying junk mail based on blacklists, content, and other cues. But filters that catch all spam often snare a fair bit of legitimate email as well.

Scott Banister, chief product officer at IronPort, has a creative solution to this problem. The company is creating a system called Bonded Sender. Legitimate emailers will post a bond against spam complaints. Systems like SpamAssassin could use this "white list" to route designated emails around spam filters. If IronPort receives complaints about bonded senders, it will draw down the bond (the money goes to a designated third party) or remove the bonded status.

The program is designed to work in concert with spam filters, which could be tuned to flag mail more aggressively once non-spam mail is pre-designated. For spammers, bonded email breaks the financial model; they would have to pay for what is now nearly free.

This project won't by itself make much money for IronPort -- although should it become a standard solution, the company could make a few bucks by charging companies for the bonding service. IronPort makes its real money selling high-performance email gateway appliances. CEO Scott Weiss sees the Bonded Sender program as a complement to this, and the first of several gateway-resident services.

- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com

• IronPort
• SpamAssassin
• Sun (ships servers with Sendmail, which IronPort competes with)
• Sendmail (commercial business built around the open-source "sendmail" message transfer agent)
• Postfix (message transfer agent)
• Qmail (message transfer agent)
• Cloudmark (collaborative anti-spam system)
• Vipul's Razor (anti-spam software)
• Postini (email management products)
• Brightmail (commercial anti-spam system)
• Dell (manufactures IronPort's appliances)

• Making Spam Go Splat (Washington Post)
• Anti-spam service battles bugs (News.com)
• Is It Spam or Is It E-Mail Direct Marketing? (Business 2.0)
• Users Fight Back Against Spam Epidemic (InformationWeek)
• Anti-Spam Tool Is 'User Aware' (InformationWeek)
• Spam.abuse.net (a good resource)

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