Many ISPs have a solution to spam that's worked in the past. It's a combination of free open source components, and it's not as good as it was.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 21, 2007]

San Francisco-based anti-spam provider Cloudmark told us that the company's SpamAssassin plugin was popular and offered to provide references. So we take them up on the offer and contact Greenville, S.C.-based NuVox, a top of the line voice provider that just acquired FDN Communications, a CLEC known to ISPs for its regulatory activism.

At NuVox, we speak to two software engineers, Art Nichols who is chief architect, and Wiley Wimberly who is chief system architect.

So what did you use before Cloudmark? "We had a combination of Spamhaus, open source real time black lists (RBLs), Sendmail, and MIMEDefang," Wimberly.

Was there a lot of manual updating? "That's correct, but once you write the code, it stays static. We were using SpamAssassin and ClamAV. Freshclam pulls down the virus updates."

The problem was the constant need to write new rule sets. "We had gotten behind in the game and couldn't write custom rules as much as we needed to."

Switching
So when did you make the switch? "We made the switch three or four weeks ago. It was very straightforward. Cloudmark provided us the plugin for SpamAssassin. We saw the Perl modules they were calling and integrated it into MIMEDefang."

So it's not a standard setup. "Right now, we're doing the Cloudmark checks first, but we're still running SpamAssassin and ClamAV. We will do that for a little while until our comfort level increases."

And the custom rules are still in place.

But the results are in. "We have a noticeable reduction in spam in the inbox," says Wimberly.

So why did you make the switch? "We just recently acquired FDN, which had a robust anti-spam solution from IronPort," says Nichols. "It was a relatively small customer base (from an e-mail perspective), but we could not degrade the level of service of the FDN customers. As a rule, we never take services away from our customers. Therefore, we needed to enhance the NuVox platform."

So why not just go with IronPort. "We wanted to keep our existing e-mail infrastructure. It was a choice between a software plugin and a hardware solution," says Nichols.

"We feared losing control by adopting the black box," says Wimberly. "With Cloudmark, we can go in, modify scoring, override whitelisting this or score that higher."

And there's a hardware cost benefit. "We're using off the shelf hardware," says Wimberly.

So how is the integration with FDN going? We don't get a specific answer. "In general, in situations like these, network integration is fairly smooth and back office systems, such as provisioning and billing, are challenging," explains Wimberly.

The future
If the system is upgraded further, NuVox could provide new services to companies that manage their own e-mail or run their own Exchange server. "We're looking at a gateway-based solution for customers who don't have our e-mail service," says Nichols. "We could provide anti-virus and anti-spam to them."

—End