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image FIRETRUST LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE ANTISPAM PROJECT image
Mailwasher
Firetrust


>  FIRETRUST LIMITED LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE ANTISPAM PROJECT

Dear CastleCops Reader,

The field-proven, cost-effective MailWasher Server email management and security solution is now available as an open source project platform.
Firetrust Limited, provider of award-winning anti-spam and email security solutions, today announced the availability of MailWasher Server as an open source software project. Available for worldwide download from http://oss.firetrust.com, MailWasher Server Open Source represents a new generation in antispam technology. MailWasher Server Open Source is an highly-effective email antispam solution for small to mid-sized businesses and large enterprises and offers a polished, well-integrated web interface and built-in quarantine management facility. Built for and optimized to run on Linux, Solaris and Windows servers, the application adopts a multi-layered approach to identifying and quarantining spam messages before unwanted or malicious emails ever enter an organization's network. The result is an antispam solution on a par with all currently available applications, however without the high cost of ownership of proprietary systems.


Designed to increase efficiency and effectiveness of email, MailWasher Server benefits an entire organization by reducing the burden on IT administrators, giving employees better control, increasing worker productivity, and most importantly, cutting costs.

"We recognize most antispam technology originates from open source projects, and believe in contributing to the knowledge with tools we have developed, helps stop the spam plague and enhances the email experience for everyone," said Nick Bolton, CEO of Firetrust. "A key benefit to MailWasher Server Open Source is that the collaboration created from the open source development community will make antispam solutions better, more stable, highly scalable and developed faster to benefit all users."

Commercial open source applications will dramatically change the antispam application market. "When you build a commercial grade antispam application utilizing the combined ideas and resources from developers across the globe, you simply develop a better, more revolutionary product than any one proprietary software can build on its own," says Nick Bolton. "We believe our open source business model is far more efficient than the classic approach to building proprietary antispam software. Our customers have full access to our source code, our bug lists, and our feature roadmap and can even contribute to the code themselves. This is how great products are developed today and I have no doubt will be well into the future," says Nick Bolton.

MailWasher Server Open Source is released under both the General Public License (GPL) and a variation of the Mozilla Public License 1.1 (Firetrust Public License - FPL) to enable developers to have a high degree of freedom but preserve compatibility and inter-operability.

System Requirements and Availability
MailWasher Server Open Source is available for Windows, Solaris and Linux environments, integrating with current versions of Sendmail, Qmail and Microsoft Exchange. MailWasher Server Open Source is now shipping and available directly from Firetrust (http://oss.firetrust.com).

About Firetrust Limited
Established in 2000, Firetrust provides world-class email security products for business and home users. Firetrust delivers solutions across the spectrum of inbox protection, including MailWasher Pro for unsolicited commercial email (spam) and Benign for neutralizing harmful email that can contain viruses, worms, scripts and Web bugs. The company is privately held and headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand. To date Firetrust's flagship product MailWasher, has had more than 5 million downloads. For more information, please visit www.firetrust.com.

MailWasher and Benign are registered trademarks of Firetrust Limited.

Press Contacts:
Deborah Abraham
Firetrust Limited
<debs.abraham@firetrust.com>



Best regards,

Nick Bolton and the team at Firetrust.
http://www.firetrust.com


Posted on Monday, 31 January 2005 @ 01:08:44 UTC by rusticdog (2323 reads)
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"FIRETRUST LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE ANTISPAM PROJECT" | Login/Create an Account | 3 comments | Search
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Re: FIRETRUST LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE ANTISPAM PROJECT (Score: 1)
by Snail  on Tuesday, 01 February 2005 @ 01:24:18 UTC
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This strikes me as a bandaid for a serious issue.

1. If your SMTP server doesn't have this sort of sucurity already built into it, it is years out of date.

2. FirstAlert! is the first line of MailWasher Server's defense against junk mail. FirstAlert!

This is only good for a few unique system, making it of little use to most SMTP hosts.

Further, as a secondary tool, it is just one more link in the chain of events for potentional errors.

3. The second most powerful feature of this tool is also one of the worst abused.
Real-time Blackhole Lists
As my months in court just proved, RBL groups, especially SORBs, are out to destroy e-mail, not help it.

RBL uses the extremeist notion that they will stop ALL e-mail except large business and companies who pay them off... that way you don't get SPAM.

4. Next in defence is Sender Address Blacklists and Whitelists

Sorry? This is a feature in every SMTP server I've seen from OS2-*nix-Windows based OS for the past decade.
Not to mention most e-mail clients can perform this function.

The features go down from there.

Really... if you want SMTP security, host your own, get one with features common to the past decade, and don't rely on 3rd party services.



Re: FIRETRUST LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE ANTISPAM PROJECT (Score: 1)
by Snail  on Tuesday, 01 February 2005 @ 19:35:33 UTC
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The problems come much in part from large e-mail services such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, who have some of the largest numbers of users while providing little to no adiquate protection.
These large providers, if at all, have some of the worst protection in AV, AT, and counter IP spoofing.
They regularly sell lists to SPAMing services and often lead their users into a very false sence of security.

Add to that, the many aged SMTP servers and those that while they can, do not supply protection.

Next, comes the majority of SMTP servers being used for bad or annoying reasons.

This is why Black Lists began.

Unfortunately though, those same RBL groups now take the extremist stand that only large business and goverment deserve e-mail.

Presently, their are 110,194 known virii that can be defended against which only effect e-mail. This doesn't take into account other virii or those unknown.

The largest email providers when tested in 2004 did not defend against even half of the threats.
Most small privately owned SMTP servers when properly set up, offer the best protection and with out the need for additional tool such as MailWasher.

I do agree that improving security (without being an extremist) is good. But my point is that tools like MailWasher are just bloat.
If one is truely interested in securing their email, they should do it the right way.
A dial up user who only connects for 15 minutes every 3 hours on a 250 MHz computer with an up to date and properly set up SMTP server, can do a better job of preventing SPAM and best protecting against threats then can Google, YaHoo and AOL combined.

MailWasher is an okay limited stop-gap for anyone who doesn't understand SMTP well. In that case, those persons should not be running such a server.

It is also a good in between tool for those who don't control their own servers (no reason anyone can't this day and age) and want protection themself from a provider who is seriously lacking protection. But again, that is just a bandaid to a much larger issue, bad providers.


 
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