When the company entered the scene, that's exactly what the website said—"The Future of Messaging"—and it said nothing else. Now it's got plenty of products, and one of them just might be the future of messaging.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 24, 2005]

When IronPort first hit the market, the website simply said "The Future of Messaging" and there was nothing to click on. "Yeah, I put that up," says Tom Gillis, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and one of the company's first employees.

IronPort's first product was a bonded sender program (see Making Spammers Pay).

It's been three years, and when we checked back in with IronPort, we found a massive portfolio of products based on one easy to explain, very cool item—if it performs as advertised.

Gillis says that IronPort's core product is a fast MTA. "Our first customer was AOL," says Gillis. "We kept installing MTAs and AOL kept breaking them. Then AOL stopped growing. Now we have 400 employees and eight of the ten largest ISPs in the U.S."

The company claims its MTA is ten times faster than traditional UNIX systems, but of course that's not what ISPs run today.

The database
The company is building a database of senders, called SenderBase, rating senders using the SpamAssassin scoring system, -10 to +10. The database uses mail data from about 100,000 domains, of which only 2,000 are IronPort customers.

Gillis says the database tracks over 110 parameters.

He says ISPs should throttle bad behavior rather than block it.

The TOC
The company also operates a Threat Operations Center.

Gillis explains. "Let's say our screens flash with unusual activity. At T=0, we quarantine all e-mails with zip file attachments. At T=5 minutes, we let all of them go except for those with attachments between 50 and 55 K in size. At T=10 minutes, we let all of those go except for those with 'price' in the zip file name."

The ISP suite
For its largest customers, IronPort has built a management suite that enables different policies for different LDAP groups. One message, sent to different recipients, can encounter different policies even within one IronPort box.

But IronPort has also enabled what it calls MultiMaster technology. There are no master and slave units. Instead, any box or group of boxes can be controlled from any other box. A GUI can display 20 boxes and show the various configurations of each, Gillis says.

Other features
The company has built in even more features. For companies like DoubleClick, IronPort enables customer separation on a single box by giving each customer their own IP.

The company is working on compliance features for issues like Sarbanes Oxley and HIPAA.

And for the future, the company is working on entry level appliances for its smaller customers.

All of this can convey only an overview of what IronPort's been doing. So is it the future of messaging? We'll have to go to the future the slow way before we know for sure.

—End