Magic box fights spam fast so email stays pure

By ADAM GIFFORD

As the war on spam heats up, gateway defences are crumbling.

A denial of service attack or new virus strain can choke up mail servers, stopping legitimate mail getting through.

Fast-growing start-up IronPort has taken the appliance route, offering an SMTP gateway server optimised for email with optional antispam and antivirus capabilities.

Australia and New Zealand manager Michael Bosch said the way email was sent and received hadn't changed much in 20 years, and new standards and products were needed to ensure it remained a viable business tool.

IronPort founders Scott Weiss and Scott Banister came from Hotmail and ListBot respectively. After their companies were acquired by Microsoft, they met at Silicon Valley think-tank idealab!, where they decided to find ways to improve email performance.

IronPort servers are built by Dell's original equipment manufacture division, so they look like standard boxes.

But under the hood is an operating system based on Free BSD Unix with a kernel built to move email quickly. "Under Unix, most operating systems are built to move big files, so low I/O (input/output) is needed. In email you have a lot of relatively small files, so high I/O is better," Bosch said.

IronPort also developed mail routing, policy filtering and threat assessment software, and formed partnerships with Brightmail for antispam and Sophos for antivirus.

Bosch said the high-end C60 server, which is aimed at large enterprise users and service providers, can handle 500,000 messages an hour.

"[Online advertising giant] DoubleClick took out 300 Sendmail servers running on Unix and put in 30 IronPorts, which gives then 50 per cent headroom," Bosch said.

Another early customer was Cisco, which bought IronPorts to track down employees leaking company secrets. "A number of internet service providers use IronPort for pure horsepower. Adelphia brought us in after a denial of service attack, and we were cutting out 10 million emails a day," Bosch said.

Bosch has helped Sun, Cisco and most recently start-up Network Appliance in this part of the world.