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IronPort Arms Both Sides In Spam War

Posted by timothy on from the and-get-outta-the-way dept.

securitas writes "We all know about IronPort's recent acquisition of SpamCop. What may not be common knowledge is that IronPort's Senderbase has 'the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages' and is popular with spam factories. Founded by two former Microsoft executives - Hotmail's Scott Weiss and ListBot founder Scott Banister - IronPort claims its customers are not spammers but legitimate marketers. Critics say that this is a clear conflict of interest. Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure. SpamCop founder Julian Haight - who had to sell the company in order to remain solvent - is quoted as saying of IronPort's anti-spam measures: "I am not sure all its standards are tough enough." The story was originally reported by the New York Times' Saul Hansell. Abbreviated mirror at IHT."

4 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Julian Haight's comments not about SpamCop by jc103 · · Score: 3, Informative
    But Haight, who will stay with company, says he is concerned that the Bonded Sender program is too lenient. "I am not sure all its standards are tough enough," he said.

    His comment was about Bonded Sender, not SpamCop.

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  2. Sounds familiar by Alizarin+Erythrosin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sounds like when that one phone company (I think it was AT&T) was selling technology to block telemarketers to consumers, and selling technology to get around technology to block telemarketers to telemarketers.

    And, as they say, hilarity ensues...

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  3. not only spammers buy it by austad · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are some legit companies that use it. A place I used to work used it for sending user-configured news and stock alerts. Interestingly enough, the box is a rebranded dell running freebsd. I have my suspicions they are using qmail on it also just because of the way it behaves. Everything is hidden behind a nice little interface though, so you have to boot with a floppy to poke around, which I never got around to doing.

    The boxes are $30k each last I checked. On a revenue of $10 million, that's likely under 300 machines if you include a support contract. Not selling many of them... :) It is a good product though, you would have serious trouble getting that kind of performance out of a standard mailserver using the same hardware.

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  4. IronPort's not just for SPAM by Stultsinator · · Score: 3, Informative

    The company I work for is looking at using one of these boxes to send our opted-in newsletters. IronPort may be popular with spammers, but I have to agree that there are perfectly ethical reasons to send out millions of emails per day (per hour in fact!) The IronPort systems are by far the fastest mail servers around.