Enthusiasm for Vircom's spam-fighting software suite goes beyond its ability to sort through unwanted e-mails. ISPs small and large are rallying behind its suite of VOP products in a customer-based coalition that shows just how well the IETF's filtering language works.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [July 19, 2002]

It's maddening that spammers make money, but it's particularly upsetting to Internet Service Providers, whose loss is often the spammers' gain. You can count the surplus bandwidth costs of spam—it's galling that ISPs pay to deliver spam to their customers. You can count the time spent answering phone calls from angry customers who don't understand why ISPs cannot stop spam. Finally, it's ISPs that pay the price when customers cancel ISP subscriptions because their in boxes are overflowing with spam.

These are just a few of the reasons why Vircom, a Montreal-based messaging service provider, has received accolades from ISPs using its new anti-spam and anti-virus services. Some very small ISPs are among Vircom's most enthusiastic clients.

Based in Ludington, Michigan, Local Internet Services, Inc. (LIS) has enjoyed so much success since it introduced Vircom's products to its subscribers that it has dedicated a blog to the war on spam.

Similarly, Texas-based San Marcos Internet (SMI) has dedicated a "No-Spam Zone" in great part to Vircom's ModusMail, along with a separate page praising the company's role in its anti-virus efforts.

Humble beginings
Like many successful ISPs, Vircom started out in the bulletin board system (BBS) business. In 1989, the company's president and founder, Sylvain Durocher, built GameMaster, a virtual gaming community. In 1993, he released his first tool for webmasters, called MajorTCP/IP. By 1997, the company had earned a solid reputation among its small- and medium-sized ISP clients.

Vircom leveraged its growing messaging expertise and positive reputation into developing and selling a suite of ISP products dubbed the Vircom Online Platform (VOP). With core functions rooted in e-mail and RADIUS, VOPmail products provide a variety of messaging services. VOP modus products provide anti-spam and also anti-virus services. VOPRadius and VOP COM are authentication packages.

As the company grew, it started to build alliances with billing companies such as RODOPI and Boardtown and also with dial-up wholesalers like Starnet/Megapop. Vircom today retains a gaming division that develops Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) for ISPs across North America, Europe and Asia.

So what exactly is Vircom doing to thwart spam and keep harmful viruses from spreading e-mail mayhem? The company is leveraging a mail filtering language known as Sieve, also known by its working group number RFC 3028. The language was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2001.

Flexible e-mail filtering
Sieve is a language that can be used to create filters for e-mail. The e-mail filtering language uses simple English words and a powerful syntax (i.e., DISCARD a message that contains ALL OF "work at home, $$$, not a scam"). An example of a Sieve script from Vircom shows just how the e-mail filtering language is very easy to read:

# Credit Card cleanup spam
if body :contains ["text/plain", "text/html"] "819-322-3376" { discard; stop; }
if body :contains ["text/plain", "text/html"] "800-934-3473" { discard; stop; }
if body :contains ["text/plain", "text/html"] "info-host.org/debt" { discard; stop; }

Sieve scripts augment traditional anti-spam measures, like the use of blacklists, such as the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS). In the past, spammers would guess likely names assigned to e-mail addresses at a particular ISP. This is known as a dictionary attack, and most anti-spam software can recognize and prevent simple dictionary attacks.

One of the things that ISPs like about Vircom's e-mail filtering products is that they are very flexible. System administrators can choose to authorize each new anti-spam or anti-virus script as it comes in, or to receive scripts for manual implementation, or allow Vircom to automatically apply all scripts.

Bertrand Houle, Vircom's vice president of sales and marketing, explained that every Vircom Sieve script has a version number and history, so that if a customer has a problem with a new script, technicians can readily revert to the previous version.

Houle added that Vircom adopted the IETF Sieve language to keep pace with spammers' evolving tactics.

"The problem was that we needed more intelligence in the data center because spammers were using new tricks, some of them encoded in shareware, to change their identity and message patterns," Houle explained. "More spam was getting through to ISPs' customers. We wanted not only to fight spam but also to give more control to IT folks and sysadmins. We were enthusiastic about a generic standard way to program rules at the server level or client level."

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