Licensing and
Partnerships
Integration
How
Mailshell Catches Spam
Licensing and Partnerships
1. How does Mailshell
license the SDK?
Mailshell provides two basic licensing models:
a) Royalty-free models, based on a flat annual fee, along
with Support fee.
b) Royalty- or revenue-sharing models in which Mailshell
earns either a percentage of sales or a fee per unit, plus
a small quarterly Support fee.
2. What is the process
for working with Mailshell?
Our complete evaluation and partnering process
is outlined here.
3. How can I evaluate
Mailshell's technology?
After signing a non-disclosure agreement,
Mailshell will create a unique, password-protected portal
for your company, complete with full SDK documentation,
Standard Operating Procedures, product downloads, ticket
tracking system, and other useful tools. This portal will
give you an opportunity to experience Mailshell's customer-focused
culture, support system, and products as our current OEM
partners do.
4. How much of Mailshell's
business is outside the United States?
More than 50% of Mailshell's business is outside
the US. We have OEM partners on five continents and 'Powered
by Mailshell' spam filters are offered for sale in more
than 30 countries.
5. Who owns Mailshell?
Is the company financially strong?
Mailshell is a privately owned company owned
by its founders and employees. We have no outside investors.
The company has been profitable for more than four years.
Founded in 1999, Mailshell has a solid, growing and profitable
business.
Integration
6. What type of products
can integrate the Mailshell SDK?
Mailshell's libraries can be integrated with
almost any messaging, security or networking application.
Current OEM partners have integrated our SDK throughout
the mail flow, including the ISP level, network infrastructure,
routers and firewalls, gateway solutions, mail server plugins,
UTM devices and end-user desktops.
7. What is the download
size of the databases?
Currently, the weekly download size is 60MB.
Mailshell provides an incremental update mechanism so each
download is small and the overall size remains manageable.
8. Does the Mailshell
SDK support multithreaded applications?
Yes, the SDK supports multithreaded applications.
9. How does Mailshell
help OEM partners integrate easily and get to market quickly?
Mailshell's SDK and documentation are designed
for simple integration. Some OEM partners have completed
integration and launched a solution within three weeks
Mailshell also provides a series of plugins
and helper applications to easily integrate the SDK into
OEM partners' existing solutions. To learn more about our
plugins and helper applications, please visit here.
10. What should I know
about messages I use to test the SDK?
Accurate evaluations of the SDK require that
that the full message is captured and that the message is
not altered in any way. Please check to ensure that all
of the headers are included especially the "Received" headers.
Since spam frequently changes, it's important
to test the SDK using the most recent spam. Mailshell can
also provide various corpora of spam you can use to test.
11. What throughput,
memory usage and platform benchmarks are available?
Supported platforms include:
• Linux (Certified for Redhat,
Mandrake, and Suse)
• Microsoft Windows
• Solaris 8 (Sparc)
• Solaris Intel
• FreeBSD
• AIX
• Mac OS X
• HP-UX
Memory usage, throughput, and benchmarks can
be found here.
12. How are databases
accessed?
The Mailshell SDK uses three different types
of databases:
1) A local database of historical statistics
and custom policies specific to the end-user installation.
2) A local copy of Mailshell filters and optional
extended rules.
3) An optional remote database of Mailshell
rules and data information stored at Mailshell's central
servers.
How
Mailshell Catches Spam
13. How does the Mailshell
Anti-Spam SDK work?
Mailshell's Anti-Spam SDK is a software library
that provides classes to communicate with the Mailshell
spam filtering engine. Functions are provided to return
a 'spam score' for each message.
The SDK includes an API (Application Programming
Interface) that allows developers to integrate Mailshell's
Anti-Spam engine with other applications, along with more
than 40 configuration options that allow OEMs to balance
memory usage, throughput and detection.
14. How does Mailshell
identify spam?
Mailshell uses a comprehensive 'cocktail'
approach to fighting spam. An overview of our technology
is located at here.
15. How accurate is the
spam filtering of Mailshell's SDK? What percent of spam
does it catch and how many 'false positives' does it create?
At its default settings, the SDK catches more
than 95% of spam with less than 0.005% 'false positives.'
Virtually all of the false positives are non-English bulk
emails such as newsletters and legitimate advertisements.
16. How much of the email
does the Mailshell SDK require? Can it handle headers separately
or the text body separately?
Currently, the Mailshell SDK requires the
OEM application to have the full RFC822 message (headers
and body together). By default, we recommend a 100kb buffer
of each message.
17. How frequently is
the anti-spam data updated?
Mailshell provides incremental updates every
five minutes. Both the size and frequency of updates are
configurable. Mailshell also provides options for a real-time
check of our remote network.
18. How are the various
Mailshell Anti-Spam data updates transmitted?
Updates are pulled automatically via HTTP
or HTTPS according to the frequency set by the client. The
program stores one live validated version while downloading
a new version. After the downloaded version is verified,
it replaces the live one.
19. What happens if a
download is somehow interrupted or not complete?
The updates are validated before they are
used. The file is automatically re-downloaded if it is corrupted
or interrupted and the previous validated version is used
in the interim.
20. How do the real-time
updates work and what benefit do they provide?
Scheduled updates are the most resource-efficient
way to run the SDK. Customers who want real-time protection
against the newest spam can set the SDK to make real-time
checks of Mailshell Anti-Spam's databases for any new data
sources, weightings or fingerprints. By default, real-time
checks are disabled.
21. Where are Mailshell's
data centers?
Mailshell has data centers throughout the
world including California, New York, Arizona, London, Paris,
Canada, and Germany.
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