The prime maker of carrier class MTAs adds a product to its portfolio to protect the edge of wired and wireless networks.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 11, 2004]

With over 140 million active licensed mailboxes in Asia, America, and Europe, Redwood City, Calif.-based Openwave's MTA, Openwave Mx, is deployed at a significant number of the world's carriers.

Now Openwave is further protecting those mailboxes with the release of Edge Gx Anti-Abuse, built to protect the edge of the network while Mx serves the core.

David Staas, senior product marketing manager at Openwave, says the company provides three levels of abuse control:

1. Gx provides the first level of abuse control, at the edge of the system.
2. Openwave (both Mx and Gx) uses anti-virus and anti-spam products such as those from McAfee, Brightmail, and Cloudmark to stop bad mail from reaching the mailbox, the second level of control.
3. The third and final level of abuse control is providing the end users with their own controls such as an allow and deny list.

Service providers that focus on maintaining only one level of abuse control, Staas says, risk having their defenses overwhelmed by a mail spike or risk seeing user-controlled defenses fail.

Edge protection against bad mail is especially vital to larger service providers. "Carriers uniquely need to stop it before it gets into the system," Staas notes.

Gx is also designed to protect cellular networks, which are seeing a steadily increasing spam problem.

The software checks for spammy connections, instead of analyzing individual messages (much like TurnTide (formerly SpamSquelcher) or ASAP!). Whereas analyzing every packet significantly tasks a CPU, analyzing each connection is relatively easy. The idea is that this method will lower costs.

"Edge Gx Anti-Abuse allows service providers to shift high cost defenses to low cost defenses," says Staas, "reducing the TCO of their anti-abuse infrastructure and their MTA infrastructure by up to 40 percent, and by up to 75 percent if you factor in the savings in churn and customer support."

The Openwave infrastructure, both Mx and Gx, are built to be flexible, compatible with a very wide variety of software. Edge Gx Anti-Abuse can be deployed as a standalone package or in tandem with Openwave Mx.

Pricing and availability
Edge Gx Anti-Abuse is available now, and is sold as a service with an annual fee. Price varies widely depending on volume purchased, but an installation of one million users would cost about one dollar per user per year.

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