"We found a solution [ASMTP] that pretty much does what your's does for a one-time hardware/software cost of under $6000. It gives customers complete control of their mail with a web-based interface, and/or gives us control on a system-wide basis. Your cost for our size company came to over $20,000 per year. That is simply not feasible when we can do it with a one-time cost of less than 1/3 of your ANNUAL cost.

With the cost for implementing the [ASMTP] solution we are using now, we can provide it at no cost to our customers. In today's market place, that's a HUGE advantage!"

David Brittenham
System Administrator

Rainbow Studios

Rainbow Studios has been running ASMTP with Microsoft Exchange 5.5 for a number of months now, and our reduction in spam has been phenomenal. We receive tens of thousands of SMTP connections per month, and about 30% of our incoming mail is junkmail. ASMTP has worked wonders, and only a handful of spam is delivered to users - to the point where users actually forward the delivered spam messages to me. I often follow up on the messages that do make it through, something unthinkable before ASMTP. I wanted a transparent solution that works, and that's what ESCOM delivered.

Dave Favier
Network Administrator
Rainbow Studios
mailadmin@rainbowstudios.com

Object Management Group

The Object Management Group (OMG) is an industry consortium with about eight hundred organizational members, with over three thousand individual members daily using our email services. These members send mail to various mailing list aliases, where our sendmail server expands each alias to the various members of the list, and then distributes the message to its members. We often see loads in the tens of megabytes of email per month.

So when a spammer would spam one of our input address aliases, the spam could be reflected to hundreds or even thousands of individual mailboxes. This of course was exactly what the spammers wanted, and contributed to the hundreds of spam mails forwarded by our server every week. We previously used sendmail to block known IP addresses, domains, and email addresses. But this didn't work very well because the spammers would just find a new relay to forward their mail to us.

ESCOM's ASMTP does dynamic testing when the remote host connects to our network. If a remote host fails these dynamic tests, ASMTP quarantines the message (on the ASMTP Appliance) until the message can be reviewed by an administrator. This architecture is a huge win for OMG because:

1. Dynamic testing allows us to intercept junk mail from previously unknown sources that would not be caught by static blacklisting techniques. The ASMTP appliance has cut down our spam load of hundreds of spams per week to a typical four or five per week.
2. Because we manage our own databases based on the spam sent to our network, we do not depend on any other sites to define what we block.
3. The quarantine architecture permits us to capture questionable mail where it can be subsequently reviewed by an an administrator. This is important because it helps ensure that we do not lose legitimate email messages from our members.
4. Finally, ASMTP allows us to take back our email addresses from the spammers. We can use our actual addresses on mailing lists, web sites, and other locations related to our business instead of continually changing or masking addresses to try to avoid the spammers.

In addition, at our suggestion, ESCOM added the capability to block messages containing certain risky attachment file types, e.g., .BAT, .EXE, .VBS. While this is not full-blown virus detection, this mechanism easily handled the recent W32/Sircam and W32/Nimda virus attacks, none of which penetrated our defenses. These sorts of messages are quarantined where one of our administrators can review and either dispose of messages without any risk of infection, or forward messages if they are legitimate.

Installation was straightforward -- we installed the appliance on the network, changed DNS to point to the appliance as our new MX host, and it began processing mail. No changes were required to our mail server.

We don't have any comparative performance figures, but it stands to reason that by removing the junk mail from our mail server, it now has more cycles to spend handling our critical mailing list activity.

We are delighted with the ESCOM ASMTP product, and recommend it unreservedly to organizations. The low price and superb performance have made the choice simple to make based on immediate return on investment, and our decision to deploy the product has greatly increased the quality of service we can offer our customers.

Dr. Richard Mark Soley
Chairman/CEO
Object Management Group, Inc.
soley@omg.org

Grebyn Corporation

Note: This includes excerpts from Grebyn's test report. For the full report, see Barbarians at the Gate -- Stopping Spam In Its Tracks.

[During] an eight week test of the Active SMTP appliance from ESCOM Corporation ... the appliance successfully quarantined over 99.87% of the spam.

During this time there were no complaints from the users that any of their correspondents had contacted them via alternate means to inform them of their inability to send mail to them because of the use of the ASMTP appliance. (As opposed to a separate test period when it was turned OFF and one of the users complained: "I guess ASMTP hasn't been running lately, because I've gotten a burst of spam."

Karl Nyberg
karl@grebyn.com
Grebyn Corporation
703-406-4161