MiaVia, a new anti-spam provider, is looking for ISPs who are willing to trade copies of received spam for spam filtering software.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [September 22, 2003]

Sausalito, Calif.-based MiaVia is promoting its Accessio anti-spam product to ISPs. For an unspecified short time, the product will be available for free to ISPs who are willing to help the company build its database of known spam.

The announcement is timely, as recent actions by VeriSign removed a key weapon from the anti-spammers' arsenal, reverse DNS lookups. It is becoming ever more important for ISPs to have a solution in place that will block known spam without blocking wanted messages. No solution is perfect, but MiaVia's intelligent filtering product, based on a database of known spam, should fit the bill.

Any filtering solution (Brightmail is the most famous in the ISP space at the moment) uses a database of known spam to create "signatures" or "spam DNA" which the software then compares against incoming e-mail. MiaVia's solution is distinguished by its combination of "human and computer intelligence" in building and maintaining its database of known spam.

"Our philosophy," explains CEO Jeff Glass, "is that filtering by example reduces errors. It's case-based. We're not just looking for key phrases; we're looking at every bit of significant content in the body of an e-mail message. As you know, a certain amount of noise is now used to camouflage most spam. We find the signal and exclude the noise, getting a more significant telltale match."

(For more, see MiaVia's How It Works page.)

Glass is embracing the ISP relationship. "We're offering a symbiotic relationship. ISPs gain an advantage using our tool and the spam we see enables our filtering to work better."

The Linux-based software can be installed on a standalone box or, if the ISP has a Linux-based mail server, it can be installed on the same box as the mail server.

To ISPs that want to supplement his solution with a blacklist, Glass advises, "we recommend that they apply our test first, minimizing false positives by allowing our solution to ID a message as not spam."

MiaVia does not set up dummy mailboxes. "Dummy mailboxes can miss portions of the spam onslaught," explains Glass.

In conclusion, Glass says, "I started this company because I felt existing filtering solutions were not accurate. The challenge is to stop more spam without false positives. We believe that the case-based approach that uses human intelligence to get spam samples offers promise over totally automated systems."

Pricing and availability
MiaVia's Accessio is available now. It is free to ISPs that share the spam they receive with MiaVia.

Software must be installed on a server (not included) with the following minimum requirements: Pentium 4 processor at 2 GHz, 1GB RAM, 30 GB of disk space, with at least 1 GB free at all times, running Linux. Currently the company only supports the following Linux distributions but plans to add more: RedHat 7.3/8.0 and Debian 3.0.

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