We all send silly emails to our friends and colluges…but last December one young London woman got the fright of her life when she found that her email had suddenly gone viral!

Holly Leam-Taylor, a trainee at the London office of Deloitte planned an awards ceremony to name the most attractive men in her office. Thinking this would be a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, she emailed a small number of her colleagues at the City accountancy firm asking them to vote. With nine categories such as “Fittest body” and “Boy most likely to sleep his way to the top”, her message certainly grabbed attention. To Holly’s amazement the email was forwarded around the world, spreading like wildfire over the internet. Soon millions of people had read it. But it wasn’t such a laughing matter for her managers and less than 24 hours after sending the email, Ms Leam-Taylor felt obliged to resign.

Speaking from the Surrey home where she lives with her parents, the 22-year-old said, “It was just a lighthearted joke to celebrate Christmas. It’s a complete shock that one email could spread like this and who would think it could get so far out of hand? In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to do but there wasn’t anything controversial or sexist in there. But if I could take it back I would and I will be so, so careful about sending any emails in future.” She hit the send button on her Christmas Awards email on Tuesday, December 8, and when she arrived at her office the next day found her inbox full.

While her email was certainly not work related, I wonder was it spam or ham? Arguments could be made for both sides, regardless, spam filters should have stopped it and prevented its spread around the world!

Our next data set to make public is our fresh list of ‘spamvertised’ websites. A Spamvertised website is one that has been advertised in a spam email. We get this data by looking into the content of spam emails that we stop on our network and striping out all of the website addresses. This data is very important as it allows us to expose the relationships between spammers and website owners.

We have given this data in a live feed to the ReportSpammers.net website. You can see it here:
http://www.reportspammers.net/what-is-spam/top-50-spamvertised-websites/

Alleged spammer Lance Atkinson (left) and his lawyer Darrell Kake (right) leave the Federal Court in Brisbane after the trial. Photo: Scott Casey

Almost every country in the world has drafted legislation that penalises spammers. We feel that these laws are not strong enough as they focus on the spammers and not the actual advertisers…these are almost always different people.

Spammers make their money by selling all sorts of pills and cheap consumer products through spam emails that they send out in massive quantities. A medium sized spam operation can send out around 10 billion messages a day. The spammer does not actually sell the products, they just drive traffic to advertisers who process the sale and then pay a commission to the spammer. Current spam legislation focuses on penalizing the spammer…but before you can do this you need to locate them. This is a very lengthy and expensive exercise…we feel that it is easier to target the advertisers.

After nearly a ten year case US and Australian courts have put an end to the illegal activities of Lance Thomas Atkinson and Jody Smith. The couple ran a huge spam delivery system that spanned several countries and sent out billions of emails a day.

This case was first taken up by BBC reporter Simon Cox in 2000. He got angry when he received an advertisement for some herbal remedy tablets in a spam email. By using a variety of tricks he was able to follow the spammer from Florida, China, India and ultimately to New Zealand. He passed on the details to SpamHaus and they took up the chase.

Spamhaus, which tracks the world’s biggest spam operations, said HerbalKing was the “number one worst spam gang on the internet” during 2007-08. At one point during its operation, HerbalKing may have accounted for over one third of all spam emails. SpamHaus then went on to work with the organizations:

• New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs
• Australian Communications and Media Authority
• U.S. FDA
• Office of Generic Drugs and Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis
• Chicago-based National Association of Boards of Pharmacy
• CastleCops, a non-profit group focused on Internet safety
• Marshall Software (NZ) Ltd.

In 2008 and after three million complaints to the US FTC the US courts issued a temporary injunction prohibiting Atkins and Smith from spamming and making false product claims, and also froze their assets pending a trial. That trial led to a $16m fine. In December 2009 the Australian Federal court issued a $210,000 penalty and in New Zealand he was fined a further $92,715.

After all this hard work very little will be achieved. Atkinson and Smith will not have to pay the US fines unless they travel to the US and the Australian and New Zealand fines could be paid from around one month revenue of their network. They will be back up online very soon and the process will have to start again to stop them.

This case helps to highlight the problem with current anti-spam laws. These try to locate and penalise the spammer. As this case proves, that is a lengthy and expensive job that takes the co-operation of several organisations. We feel that spam laws need to penalise the advertiser too. This is because while it is hard to find spammers such as the Atkinson and Smith, it is much easier to locate the advertisers that use spam. This is because the spam itself almost always has information on how to contact the advertiser. If the advertisers who use spam to advertise were penalised, then spam will be, if not stopped, then greatly reduced. Since much of spam advertises fraudulent products, the advertisers themselves can be prosecuted for fraud.

The route to market for emailcloud has always been to trade through resellers exclusively, they are the core of our business and our reseller relationships are our strongest and most prised assets.

This month, 27 months after we released emailcloud we are getting ready to celebrate our 1,300′eth customer. This is a huge success and we are very grateful to our resellers and partners for making this possible….some of our highest performing partners are:

United Kingdom

• Wyenet
• Custom Computer Services
• Cyberware
• Sussex Internet
• Nomis
• Message Shield
• Eskdale Solutions
• Fusebox Design
• Madefor Computer Services Ltd
• Qruse
  

Ireland

• PcPro Computers
• Fort Technology
• IP-Net
• Blacknight
• Antispam.ie
• Cada Media Ltd

We look forward to continued growth in 2010!

So, how do we do it? We don’t sell services direct…ever! We only sell our services through a network or resellers, partners and distributors in the UK, Ireland and the USA. This allows us to focus on providing a rock sold infrastructure while our partners manage our sales channel for us.

Our typical reseller is a small IT company or web hosting provider. They use a reseller control panel that allows them to add customers along with their domains and users to the system. Once added to the reseller panel these settings are pushed across our distributed network within five minutes. We get around 80% of our business from this network of hard working resellers. If you run an IT company and you think your customers would be interested in spam and virus protection servers please get in contact…we can get an account setup very quickly for you!

www.antispam.ie

In addition to resellers we also work with white label partners such as www.antispam.ie, www.cadamedia.ie, secure.identityautomationmailscan.com and www.messageshield.co.uk . We have setup co-branded systems for these companies because they already sold email services under these brands and  it was simple to release the service with a brand that these customers recognize and trust…allowing us to get a much larger customer penetrating than would normally be achieved. Do you already provide a spam and virus protection service to your clients? If so please get in contact as we may be able to help you to add more services to your clients, dive up margin and lower costs!

Allowing our partners to focus on sales allows us to keep our costs down and to stay very technically focused. This allows out dev team to attend trade shows, conferences and working groups to learn about new technologies…and in some cases we run the events!

We are looking for more resellers and partners. If you are interested in finding out more please contact us!

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Our emailcloud protection system filters spam and viruses from email. Over the past few years we have seen rates of spam increasing from around 50% a few years ago to an average of 95%…but yesterday was special….we reached 99% spam on one of our spam clusters!

This graph represents the traffic at our Liverpool facility yesterday, Monday 29th June 2009. This shows the number of simultaneous SMTP connections on the cluster every five minutes. The black line is legit email, the others graph different types of spam.

Interesting points:

• The rate of spam is rather constant through the day at around 2,000 simultaneous connections
• the rate of legit email is very low through the day but spikes to 3,000 simultaneous connections on seven times through the day
• Spikes are unpredictable!
• Traffic peeked on the cluster at around 23:00 with nearly 7,000 simultaneous connections

We have been watching traffic over the past few years and while the volume of legit email is increasing every month it is being out paced by the growth of spam. If you are having spam problems contact us!

1. What are my initial reactions?
   As with all Google products or services…I am extremely impressed. I have not decided if I will ever use this service, but I see a value for it and I see that it will probably become very popular.
2. Is this truly unique or new?
   It’s not often that people invent a completely new product or service. Most new products of services are re-implemented versions of their forbearers or results of UAOTATC (unique assembly of tried and tested components). After much thought, I believe that Google Wave is both. It has remarkable similarities to Microsoft Groove and Microsoft Sharepoint while also looking like a Frankenstein version of email, IM, Google Docs and wiki.
3. Is this a replacement to traditional email?
   Firstly, I don’t think that it would be possible to replace traditional email. While I believe that email is deeply flawed in its current guise, I feel that it is too deeply integrated into our lives to be washed away by this technology. With that said, I can see a world where email and wave work alongside. Wave can become a welcome addition to our communication tool set which already includes email, IM, blogs, Twitter, social media sites (Linkedin, Facebook etc) and Wiki.

   Mass adoption would be helped if it was built into normal SME mail servers (such as Mdaemon or even Microsoft Exchange) and traditional email clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook. That way you could read emails and ride waves from the one client. I can’t see integration into MS products any time soon but due to the open-source status of the code I would be surprised if modules aren’t released for other products soon.

4. Will this be the end of spam?
   Well…we have been predicting a technology that would herald the end of spam for almost a decade. Ending spam is the ‘holy grail’ of email and many companies have set their sights on this and failed.

   Research around this area has focused upon the reciprocity of the email sender or server. This is a theoretical value that quantifies the persons online reputation. If we can quantify this properly then we could disregard the emails of people with bad scores. RBL’s and DCC try to work in this area. This research has also been built into most social media services, but while it is very useful for personal relationships online, I believe that this sort of analysis fails once you bring it into the business community because:

   a) Businesses want to receive emails from un-know people…they could be from potential clients
   and
   b) Just because you have a good reputation online does not mean that I want to communicate with you.

   This is the reason why email spam has not been wiped out yet….we want to stop spam but allow unsolicited emails.

   To partake in a Google Wave it seems that you need to be invited…so it would seem that it is very unlikely that spam could be sent using waves…but you could be spammed by people inviting you to join waves in much the same way that you are spammed by invites to Linkedin and Facebook.

5. Will this aid Google’s domination of the world?
   No…Google is not trying to dominate the world…but they are a commercial company and they are trying to make their products and services ubiquitous. Google Wave will help with this goal…this is neither wrong or evil.
6. Why did Google make the code and protocol open source?
   I guess that Google want to get a higher presence in the business community. This is where all the money is. Most of the existing Google services are fully hosted services…the user has little access to the data and has very little control over it….this is one if the big stumbling blocks that this community has is data protection and data persistence. Giving the business community the ability to host their own server breaks down some of these barriers.

So, in conclusion, I guess that Google Wave is going to be very popular…but I cant see in what markets it will succeed and I dont believe that it will make email redundant.

The service will be sold at £8.50 per user per month and includes:

• Exchange 2007 Mailbox
• 2GB Total Diskspace per user (optional upgrade to 4Gb)
• 1 x Public Folder per user
• Full Outlook functionality
• Full support for iPhone
• Windows Mobile support
• Unlimited Contacts
• Shared Contacts, Calendars and Tasks
• Outlook Web Access
• IMAP/POP3, Outlook Anywhere and ActiveSync
• 1 x copy of Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008 per user
• Continuous Backups

The Rozmic Hosted Exchange service is a hosted enterprise messaging solution based on Microsoft

Exchange Server 2007. Hosted Exchange helps give your business the email security it demands, your employees the email access they want, and your IT staff the operational efficiency it needs. The service uses our knowledge of Microsoft products, best practices developed with Microsoft’s customers and partners, and our infrastructure to deliver a world-class, mission-critical service.

You can find out more about this service here:
http://www.emailcloud.com/hosted_exchange.html

Array 5, the Union Rep at emailcloud

Our emailcloud email operations will undergo a significant change in working practices effective immediately. These changes will impact on all customers of our spam protection service.

After lengthy negotiations with the union who represent 90% of our computer servers we have come to the agreement that our Sunday email service would be discontinued in an effort to lower costs while allowing sufficient ‘family time’ for our network infrastructure units.

Ross Cooney, our CTP has announced:

“Any correspondence sent after 11:59 p.m. on Saturday will now be delivered by noon on Monday,”

Furthremore:

“Users should expect further delays during national holidays or on days affected by bad weather.”

It has also been announced that further changes are in the pipeline and that it is entirely possible that all email attachments will also be charged by weight.

We hope that our customers understand that a good work life balance is important for both staff and servers at the emailcloud facility.