MailChannels™ Traffic Control™ is an e-mail connection management solution that significantly reduces abusive traffic and maintains critical e-mail service while under attack from spammers.

By now, most organizations have deployed some form of "connection management" to reduce spam traffic before it hits their spam filter. The most common technique is connection blocking, often referred to as "reputation filtering"... Did you know that more can be done to reduce spam at the network edge?

Slowing down spam traffic leads to dramatic spam volume reduction

Traffic Control slows down suspicious e-mail senders, letting legitimate e-mail through while causing impatient spammers to give up. Because spammers require rapid, high-volume delivery to make money, they disconnect after being slowed, looking elsewhere for unprotected targets. This is a completely different and more effective way to stop spam than other so-called traffic-shaping systems, which merely ask suspicious senders to retry later.

Traffic Control uses sophisticated analytics working at the network edge to separate legitimate senders from suspicious senders, prioritizing bandwidth and mail server resources for legitimate senders, while in the process, punishing spammers.

Spammers are Impatient

70-90% of spammers give up before completing message delivery if their connection is substantially slowed down. MailChannels™ has conducted extensive research into the behavior of spammers and legitimate e-mail senders. One of our key discoveries has been that spammers are considerably less tolerant of delays in e-mail delivery than legitimate senders.

On analyzing millions of message delivery attempts across our customer sites, we have actually determined that the median spammer waits just five seconds to get a message delivered, whereas more than 60% of legitimate senders wait more than six minutes. These findings were presented at the 2007 MIT Spam Conference, where the audience recognized their significance by awarding our CEO with the "best paper" prize.

Spammers are dramatically less patient than legitimate e-mail senders

This chart was generated using data from over 1.2 million e-mail delivery attempts at a service provider. The chart shows the median number of seconds for which senders in each group are willing to wait to get a message delivered. The traffic shaping technology built in to Traffic Control allows us to slow down e-mail connections coming from spammers so that they give up on message delivery. Real-world experience has proven that this technique works effectively to mitigate spam traffic.

SMTP Multiplexing:

Traffic Control™ uses its patent-pending Real-Time SMTP Multiplexing feature to dramatically increase connection capacity of a single MTA from approximately 100 to 10,000 + simultaneous inbound connections. The higher capacity is essential for the effectiveness of traffic shaping techniques which require each unknown connection to be held open longer. Therefore the ability to maintain and manage thousands of simultaneous connections is needed. In addition, when spammers turn up the volume, sudden spikes in connection concurrency can overwhelm traditional e-mail servers, such as: Sendmail, Postfix, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell Groupwise.

Reputation & Behavior Analysis:

Accurate decisions regarding the trustworthiness of each sender is essential to the effectiveness of Traffic Control™. To do this, MailChannels™ Reputation Network leverages detailed anonymized e-mail transaction information available from participating customer sites.

By tracking details such as bad protocol compliance or unusual delivery times of hundreds of millions of SMTP connections per day, the trustworthiness of millions of e-mail senders can be determined. MailChannels™ Reputation Network ensures legitimate e-mail is delivered right away, and suspicious (unidentified) e-mail is slowed down. Known sources of spam, virus, and phishing e-mails are blocked.

Traffic Control™ pre-sorts email before it reaches the MTA servers. Legitimate e-mail is sent through right away, known spammer messages are rejected, and suspicious e-mail is slowed down long enough for most spammers to abort.

Traditional e-mail security approach puts the burden on the MTA servers that receive, analyze, filter, and quarantine – a process that doesn't scale with high message loads and concurrency, overwhelming spam filters and quarantines.

Inside Traffic Control:

• True Traffic Shaping dynamically allocates data transfer rate to each connection
• Real-time SMTP Multiplexing manages 10,000+ simultaneous inbound connections
• Reputation based prioritization receives legitimate messages first
• Unknown sender protection, including botnets and targeted attacks

Configuration & Monitoring:

• Simple, plain text configuration
• Detailed e-mail transaction logging
• Collaborative reputation network automatically determines legitimate sender reputations
• Centralized cluster management
• On-the-fly configuration changes
• Centralized reporting and problem resolution

Implementation:

• Works transparently with SmarterMail™ or MTA / anti-spam filter
• Immediate protection from all unknown senders