Melbourne IT's e-mail system no longer under a cloud

Australian Web hosting company, Melbourne IT, has replaced its e-mail filtering service after battling serious service disruptions last year due to soaring spam volumes and phishing attacks.

The application hosting company took steps to protect its e-mail subscribers from messaging abuse following interruptions in mid-2007 when the company was bombarded by a growing stream of malicious traffic.

Since then the company has introduced a new provider Cloudmark Authority following a trial to its premium e-mail subscribers earlier this year.

The pilot led to a significant reduction in spam and viruses making their way into customer inboxes and reduced infrastructure requirements by 80 per cent with cost savings in hardware, power consumption and space requirements which is critical for a hosting company.

Melbourne IT's previous filtering solution couldn't process the high volume of malicious traffice as effectively and efficiently.

Cloudmark solutions distributor, eCorner, recommended an in-house pilot program to test offerings from Cloudmark and a large Internet security software company.

eCorner managing director, John Debrincat said during the pilot both Cloudmark and the competitor filtered the same 10 per cent of the total production message stream through Melbourne IT over seven full days, scanning around 1.5 million messages.

"Cloudmark proved much more effective than the other company, stopping 45 per cent of all messages compared to their 26 per cent," Debrincat said.

"The Cloudmark solution reduced traffic to Melbourne IT's internal MTA and mail store by 19 per cent, had lower false positives and was able to process the same number of messages in less than half the time required by the competitor."

Debrincat said Cloudmark works on a collaborative global network of more than 260 million mailboxes, all of which receive messages in real time and provide instant feedback to the system whenever a new spam message is identified.

He said the company's Advanced Message Fingerprinting algorithms and real-time corroborated feedback mechanisms create an in-memory cache of verified fingerprints that is automatically updated and distributed to customers every 45 seconds.

"This ensures that all email servers are immediately protected, instead of having to wait for a programmer to write a new rule and send it out via an update, as with other companies," Debrincat added.

Cloudmark Asia Pacific VP, David Somerville, said like every country with high Internet penetration Australia is facing the problems associated with the global increase in spam, phishing and virus attacks.

"Unfortunately, while many messaging security providers deliver threat coverage for the US and Europe, coverage in Australia, especially against threats originating in Australia and Asia, has been erratic and unreliable," he said.

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