Licensing and
Partnerships
Integration
How
Mailshell Catches Spam
Licensing and Partnerships
1. How does Mailshell
license the SDK?
Mailshell provides two basic licensing models:
a) Royalty-free models, based on a flat annual fee, along
with Support fee.
b) Royalty- or revenue-sharing models in which Mailshell
earns either a percentage of sales or a fee per unit, plus
a small quarterly Support fee.
2. What is the process
for working with Mailshell?
Our complete evaluation and partnering process
is outlined here.
3. How can I evaluate
Mailshell's technology?
After signing a non-disclosure agreement,
Mailshell will create a unique, password-protected portal
for your company, complete with full SDK documentation,
Standard Operating Procedures, product downloads, ticket
tracking system, and other useful tools. This portal will
give you an opportunity to experience Mailshell's customer-focused
culture, support system, and products as our current OEM
partners do.
4. How much of Mailshell's
business is outside the United States?
More than 50% of Mailshell's business is outside
the US. We have OEM partners on five continents and 'Powered
by Mailshell' spam filters are offered for sale in more
than 30 countries.
5. Who owns Mailshell?
Is the company financially strong?
Mailshell is a privately held company owned
by its founders and employees. We have no outside investors.
Founded in 1999, Mailshell has a solid, growing and profitable
business with double-digit annual growth in both revenues
and profit over the last five years.
Integration
6. What type of products
can integrate the Mailshell SDK?
Mailshell's libraries can be integrated with
almost any messaging, security or networking application.
Current OEM partners have integrated our SDK throughout
the mail flow, including the ISP level, network infrastructure,
routers and firewalls, gateway solutions, mail server plugins,
UTM devices and end-user desktops.
7. What is the download
size of the databases?
Currently, with the default settings, about 2.3MB of data
is downloaded per week. Some changes are sent incrementally so each
download is small and the overall size remains manageable.
8. What are the current
library sizes for 5.2.1 across all supported platforms?
| OS |
Version |
Library Size |
| Linux 32 bit |
v6.0 |
13.30MB |
| Linux 64 bit |
v6.0 |
12.60MB |
| FreeBSD7 |
v6.0 |
8.40MB |
| FreeBSD6 64 bit |
v6.0 |
11.50MB |
| FreeBSD6 |
v6.0 |
9.90MB |
| Mac OS X PPC |
v6.0 |
7.80MB |
| Mac OS X Universal |
v6.0 |
17.40MB |
| Solaris Intel |
v6.0 |
13.00MB |
| Solaris Sparc |
v6.0 |
10.00MB |
| Windows 32 bit |
v6.0 |
5.20MB |
| Windows 64 bit |
v6.0 |
6.40MB |
9. Does the Mailshell
SDK support multithreaded applications?
Yes, the SDK supports multithreaded applications.
10. How does Mailshell
help OEM partners integrate easily and get to market quickly?
Mailshell's SDK and documentation are designed
for simple integration. Some OEM partners have completed
integration and launched a solution within three weeks
Mailshell also provides a series of plugins
and helper applications to easily integrate the SDK into
OEM partners' existing solutions. To learn more about our
plugins and helper applications, please visit here.
11. What should I know
about messages I use to test the SDK?
Accurate evaluations of the SDK require that
that the full message is captured and that the message is
not altered in any way. Please check to ensure that all
of the headers are included especially the "Received" headers.
Since spam frequently changes, it's important
to test the SDK using the most recent spam. Mailshell can
also provide various corpora of spam you can use to test.
12. What throughput,
memory usage and platform benchmarks are available?
Supported platforms include:
• Linux (Certified for Redhat,
Mandrake, and Suse)
• Microsoft Windows
• Solaris 8 (Sparc)
• Solaris Intel
• FreeBSD
• AIX
• Mac OS X
• HP-UX
Memory usage, throughput, and benchmarks can
be found here.
13. How are databases
accessed?
The Mailshell SDK uses three different types
of databases:
1) LiveFeed, Mailshell's proprietary real-time
reputation data service.
2) A local database of historical statistics
and custom policies specific to the end-user installation.
3) A local copy of Mailshell filters and optional
extended lookups.
How
Mailshell Catches Spam
14. How does the Mailshell
Anti-Spam SDK work?
Mailshell's Anti-Spam SDK is a software library
that provides classes to communicate with the Mailshell
spam filtering engine. Functions are provided to return
a 'spam score' for each message.
The SDK includes an API (Application Programming
Interface) that allows developers to integrate Mailshell's
Anti-Spam engine with other applications, along with more
than 40 configuration options that allow OEMs to balance
memory usage, throughput and detection.
15. How does Mailshell
identify spam?
Mailshell employs email filtering engines
built using the Mailshell AI Engine, a state-of-the-art
artificial intelligence (AI) engine, and Mailshell LiveFeed
reputation technology to identify email spam. An overview
of our technology is located at here.
16. What is LiveFeed?
LiveFeed is Mailshell's real-time reputation
data feed service that combines increased throughput with
improved detection rates to deliver more accurate, complete
and up-to-date protection. Unlike other "reputation" systems
that are simply IP blacklists, LiveFeed quantifies reputations
for IPs, domains and URLs, and provides a trust rating and
numerical score for each. An overview of LiveFeed is located
at here.
17. Why should I use
LiveFeed?
1. More than just IPs: LiveFeed contains IPs, domains,
URLs, phone numbers, and email addresses which allow for greater depth
and coverage. Sender Fingerprints, Message Fingerprints, and others will
be added in 2009.
2. Fast: LiveFeed queries use DNS via UDP, making
them far faster and more lightweight than other services.
Standard DNS caching software like DNScache and Bind can be
used to further increase performance.
3. Detailed: Unlike other services that provide
a binary "good or bad" rating, LiveFeed provides detailed
scoring that allows OEMs to map its results to policies.
We provide web tools to review and correct ratings.
18. How accurate is the
spam filtering of Mailshell's SDK? What percent of spam
does it catch and how many 'false positives' does it create?
At its default settings, the SDK catches more than 99% of
spam with less than 0.005% 'false positives.' Virtually all of the
false positives are non-English bulk emails such as newsletters and
legitimate advertisements.
19. How much of the email
does the Mailshell SDK require? Can it handle headers separately
or the text body separately?
Currently, the Mailshell SDK works best with
the full RFC822 message (headers and body together) and
optionally the SMTP envelope (e.g. MAIL FROM:). However,
it will process whatever it is given to derive a score.
For training, it is important that any changes to the trained
spam also occur on the trained legit messages. LiveFeed
can operate independently with just a list of IPs and/or
Domains.
20. How do LiveFeed real-time
checks work?
LiveFeed queries use DNS via UDP, making them
far faster and more lightweight than other services. Each
client can process approximately 50,000 LiveFeed queries
per second.
21. How frequently is
the anti-spam data updated?
In addition to the real-time LiveFeed checks
over DNS, Mailshell provides incremental client-side filter
updates every five minutes. Both the size and frequency
of updates are configurable. Mailshell also provides options
for a real-time check of our remote network.
22. How are the various
Mailshell Anti-Spam data updates transmitted?
LiveFeed checks are done over DNS via UDP.
Additionally, client-side updates are pulled automatically
via HTTP or HTTPS according to the frequency set by the
client. The program stores one live validated version while
downloading a new version. After the downloaded version
is verified, it replaces the live one.
23. What happens if a
download is somehow interrupted or not complete?
The updates are validated before they are
used. The file is automatically re-downloaded if it is corrupted
or interrupted and the previous validated version is used
in the interim.
24. Where are Mailshell's
data centers?
Mailshell has data centers throughout the
world including California, Pennsylvania, the United Kingdom,
Germany, the Russian Federation, Hong Kong, China, Japan,
Singapore, Australia, Argentina and Panama. More info:
Mailshell
Global Data Network.
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