Gideon Mantel, CEO of Commtouch, says his company's "sophisticated approximate matching" technique is more effective than his competitors' anti-spam solutions.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [June 23, 2003]

Mountain View, Calif.-based Commtouch has been in the messaging business since its founding in 1991 in Netanya, Israel. In 1996, the company began to build a hosted e-mail solution. The hosted e-mail solution now serves 30 million mailboxes worldwide. As the volume of spam attacking this installed base grew, the company developed an anti-spam solution called ASAP! that it sells today.

Originally developed for the enterprise environment, the company is exploring various ways of selling its anti-spam product to ISPs and through ISPs. "We treat ISPs as Value Added Resellers (VARs)," says Gideon Mantel, the company's co-founder and CEO. "If ISPs want to offer our solution to their enterprise customers, we enable them to do so. If they only want to use our spam detection capabilities, we offer them an SDK that allows them to use our sophisticated engine much as they would use an RBL."

The company's detection engine is built on the theory that content filtering is insufficient for a business that receives several hundred thousand unique spam attacks per day. The detection center receives tens of millions of e-mails per day and analyzes the likelihood that any message is spam based on the overall traffic pattern. It finds common elements of spam messages and creates digital signatures that are used by ASAP! installations around the world.

"We use sophisticated approximate matching," explains Mantel. "We are not fooled when the spammer changes the subject, IP, or the e-mail address they're sending from. We are able to get a very high detection level with a very low rate of false positives." This approach also allows the company to catch spam in foreign languages and spam that is not text-based, such as streaming audio or video.

He points to a recent lab test in PC Magazine which showed that although Brightmail has a very low rate of false positives, it also lets through over 25 percent of all spam. Another solution popular with ISPs, Postini, did better at filtering spam, letting through less than 10 percent, but had an astonishingly high false positive rate of 1.34 percent in the magazine's tests. Results are explained in detail in the article.

"A corporation can decide to forbid any e-mail that has the word 'sex' in it," Mantel notes. "ISPs cannot implement policies like that. This makes ISPs especially vulnerable to spam."

Mantel claims he'd like to do an anti-spam product shootout much like the contests between anti-virus vendors that have been organized in the past. Perhaps we'll see one at a future ISPCON. Until then, of course, ISPs will have to test any solution themselves.

The solution features basic add-ons that are expected in any corporate anti-spam solution, such as personal whitelists and blacklists, enterprise policy enforcement, and privacy assurance (all traffic to and from Commtouch is SSL encrypted). The company further claims that the end-user simplicity of the solution will lower IT costs for both ISPs and their customers.

Pricing and availability
For ISPs that become a sales channel for Commtouch, acting as a VAR, they get a percentage of the list price that depends on sales volume. The list price starts at $20 per user per year, going below $15 for volume orders.

ISPs can also license an SDK and connect to the Commtouch spam detection center themselves. Since ISPs vary widely in size, volume discounts can be significant. For an ISP with a few thousand users, the price would be $3 per mailbox per year. For ISPs with several million users, the per-mailbox price would be much lower.

—End