Solid Oak Software Launches Email Sender Reputation Service.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Solid Oak Software, publishers of CYBERsitter and other Internet Content Management software for over 10 years, has launched a new service that provides email sender reputation ratings that significantly reduce spam and wasted bandwidth on email servers. The new service is appropriately named MXRate.

Solid Oak also offers a full featured anti-spam gateway for mail servers called Alligate. One of the features of Alligate is that it automatically provides real-time reports to Solid Oak's main servers on remote incoming message activity. Not only are spam sources tracked, acceptable messages, user whitelisted messages, and false positives are also reported. Incoming data is then analyzed by fully automated systems at Solid Oak and statistics are updated for each address reported.

According to Brian Milburn, President of Solid Oak Software, and lead developer of the MXRate system, extremely high accuracy can be achieved because MXRate looks at the total historical picture of the sending habits of any given address. Unlike traditional DNS based blacklists that sometimes arbitrarily list entire blocks of addresses, MXRate uses numerous factors in calculating the probability that the sender is an active spammer. No subjective or brute force techniques are used and if a computer at any specific address stops sending spam, their probability rating is quickly downgraded. Solid Oak also employs an extensive network of spam trap domains, some of which have been operating since 1996. This results in a long term average false positive rate of less than 7 in 10,000.

Also, unlike traditional blacklist offerings, MXRate is available as a locally installed Windows application that allows administrators to define responses based on probabilities they select. It is a specially designed DNS server that installs as a Windows NT service and works in exactly the same way as public DNS blacklists. No user DNS modifications are necessary and users can be up and running in a few minutes. Because it runs locally on the users' network, quality of service is assured, and response times are negligible. It uses the industry standard IP4R DNSBL format, and will work with dozens of current mail server products and anti-spam add-in programs from any platform.

One especially useful and unique feature of MXRate is that it also identifies the country of origin for each address and allows administrators to easily block or allow connections by country. This can dramatically reduce spam on corporate and educational email servers, for example, where "friendly" or "offending" countries can easily be identified.

MXRate is available as a subscription-based service, and includes all software, product updates and technical support. Database updates are performed automatically every 60 minutes so it is virtually maintenance free. It is also available as a free public DNS blacklist service for low volume, non-commercial users, however the probability settings are pre-defined and no technical support is provided.

Additional information is available at http://www.mxrate.com.