Has anyone used Traffic Control - http://mailchannels.com/ ? seems like a neat idea
New Spam Control - MailChannels
- Thread starter welch
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nobaloney
NoBaloney Internet Svcs - In Memoriam †
Would you be willing to explain it? After spending about ten minutes on the page all I find is marketing doublespeak.
And it's a commercial product; we can only use it for free for noncommercial use under 10,000 smtp connections a day. Webhosting is commercial use.
There's no pricing information on their site. So I called them. The sales grub wouldn't tell me how much it costs. He told me the company would partner with me and I'd sell it to my clients.
Sounds like an interesting pricing model. I charge my customers and send them money. But wait ...
It runs on each of my webservers, and it runs in front of exim. Which means that it passes on to exim, untreated, email for any customer who doesn't want to pay for it.
Of course that makes SpamBlocker technology, included free in DirectAdmin, unusable, because all email comes to exim from localhost.
Which means all you can do is filter non-buyers with SpamAssassin.
I don't like that model, you may. If so, find out how much money it costs, and what exactly it does (I never got that far, and the website is intentionallly vague), and let us make our own decisions
.
Jeff
And it's a commercial product; we can only use it for free for noncommercial use under 10,000 smtp connections a day. Webhosting is commercial use.
There's no pricing information on their site. So I called them. The sales grub wouldn't tell me how much it costs. He told me the company would partner with me and I'd sell it to my clients.
Sounds like an interesting pricing model. I charge my customers and send them money. But wait ...
It runs on each of my webservers, and it runs in front of exim. Which means that it passes on to exim, untreated, email for any customer who doesn't want to pay for it.
Of course that makes SpamBlocker technology, included free in DirectAdmin, unusable, because all email comes to exim from localhost.
Which means all you can do is filter non-buyers with SpamAssassin.
I don't like that model, you may. If so, find out how much money it costs, and what exactly it does (I never got that far, and the website is intentionallly vague), and let us make our own decisions
.Jeff
Alternative
Well, the purpose of the traffic control is to approach spam at a different model. Most of the time spammers are early talkers, talking before a banner is hit. If you throttle them, they will either try again later at which time they will be throttled again, most likely jumping to another point.
Correct me if im wrong, but as its self, what does spamblocker do other than using third party RBLs?
I have worked with the commercial product of Traffic Control with Cloudmark and MAPS. The product combination works really well.
I have heard from other sources that the pricing is a per user base.
But then again, isn't google mail / apps a better solution to most things out there
Well, the purpose of the traffic control is to approach spam at a different model. Most of the time spammers are early talkers, talking before a banner is hit. If you throttle them, they will either try again later at which time they will be throttled again, most likely jumping to another point.
Correct me if im wrong, but as its self, what does spamblocker do other than using third party RBLs?
I have worked with the commercial product of Traffic Control with Cloudmark and MAPS. The product combination works really well.
I have heard from other sources that the pricing is a per user base.
But then again, isn't google mail / apps a better solution to most things out there
Last edited:
ttul
New member
Clarification on Traffic Control
I noticed your posting about Traffic Control and wanted to write a post to clarify some things about the product and pricing.
First, I agree that our web site has too much marketese in it
. Sorry about that. We're working to improve the web site so that it will speak engineer language and are planning to put up a set of videos that will explain things in a clear visual manner. Until then, know that our sales people are actually software engineers and are more than happy to answer questions with no strings attached.
Second, regarding what Traffic Control does, and how it differs from things like SpamBlocker, Traffic Control is not just a blocker. It's a sophisticated, high performance SMTP connection manager that pre-sorts incoming SMTP traffic into different "quality of service" categories, blocks the really bad stuff, passes the good stuff at high speed, and slows down everything that is suspicious. Blockers tap out at about 90% anti-spam effectiveness. By slowing down the suspicious stuff, we can boost that to 97%.
So you're getting rid of 97% of spam before it even hits your spam filter. For end users, that means a lot less spam is getting through SpamAssassin downstream.
You can think of Traffic Control as a load balancer, with traffic shaping. We take care of the abusive stuff at the connection level more effectively than anybody else, and then gently pass it on to your mail server (i.e. Exim) for final delivery.
On pricing, I apologize that our site does not provide clear pricing information. We're not set up to sell directly to small organizations, but the good news is that we're working with more and more hosting providers to get Traffic Control into their hands so that they can sell it to their customers at a very reasonable price. We're also building really easy to use plugins for Plesk, cPanel, and other control panels that will allow Traffic Control to be enabled with a single click.
If you want to test Traffic Control in the mean time, please don't hesitate to simply download the software from our web site and install it. Then shoot an email to [email protected] and ask for an evaluation license so that you can do more than 10,000 connections per day. If you ask for the Plesk or cPanel installer, we can send that to you. They're not officially released yet, but they work just fine.
If it works for you, introduce us to your service provider and we'll put some serious effort in to getting Traffic Control deployed by your service provider on a reseller basis. An intro from a customer makes the business development process go a lot faster.
Thanks,
Ken Simpson
CEO, MailChannels
I noticed your posting about Traffic Control and wanted to write a post to clarify some things about the product and pricing.
First, I agree that our web site has too much marketese in it
. Sorry about that. We're working to improve the web site so that it will speak engineer language and are planning to put up a set of videos that will explain things in a clear visual manner. Until then, know that our sales people are actually software engineers and are more than happy to answer questions with no strings attached.Second, regarding what Traffic Control does, and how it differs from things like SpamBlocker, Traffic Control is not just a blocker. It's a sophisticated, high performance SMTP connection manager that pre-sorts incoming SMTP traffic into different "quality of service" categories, blocks the really bad stuff, passes the good stuff at high speed, and slows down everything that is suspicious. Blockers tap out at about 90% anti-spam effectiveness. By slowing down the suspicious stuff, we can boost that to 97%.
So you're getting rid of 97% of spam before it even hits your spam filter. For end users, that means a lot less spam is getting through SpamAssassin downstream.
You can think of Traffic Control as a load balancer, with traffic shaping. We take care of the abusive stuff at the connection level more effectively than anybody else, and then gently pass it on to your mail server (i.e. Exim) for final delivery.
On pricing, I apologize that our site does not provide clear pricing information. We're not set up to sell directly to small organizations, but the good news is that we're working with more and more hosting providers to get Traffic Control into their hands so that they can sell it to their customers at a very reasonable price. We're also building really easy to use plugins for Plesk, cPanel, and other control panels that will allow Traffic Control to be enabled with a single click.
If you want to test Traffic Control in the mean time, please don't hesitate to simply download the software from our web site and install it. Then shoot an email to [email protected] and ask for an evaluation license so that you can do more than 10,000 connections per day. If you ask for the Plesk or cPanel installer, we can send that to you. They're not officially released yet, but they work just fine.
If it works for you, introduce us to your service provider and we'll put some serious effort in to getting Traffic Control deployed by your service provider on a reseller basis. An intro from a customer makes the business development process go a lot faster.
Thanks,
Ken Simpson
CEO, MailChannels
nobaloney
NoBaloney Internet Svcs - In Memoriam †
A lot. And I suppose it's about time to document it, so I'm going to work on that within the next hour or so. I'm going to document only SpamBlocker 3-beta and my latest release candidate (running only on one of my servers) as that's what we're using moving into the future and that's what DirectAdmin will probably include as an effective free solution.
But the main issue I have with MailChannels, and the one I have a problem with, is that if you use MailChannels then ALL email coming on to your server, even for users who don't pay to use MailChannels, comes from localhost (that's what their salesdroids tell me, and their CEO tells me their salesdroids are all techs) which breaks the Blocker part of SpamBlocker; since blocklists work by origin, and since the origin of all email is localhost, no email will be blocked by any blocklist for those who choose to not use MailChannels. In other words once MailChannels is implemented on your server, it's that or no blocking at all.
I'm not sure what you mean. Is Traffic Control something to do with MailChannels?
When I asked the price the salesdroid told me that's up to me. When I asked him what he meant he told me that I could offer it to my clients for whatever I want. I took that to mean per-user (probably per mailbox), but the problem is that then there's no free spamblocking solution for my DirectAdmin clients.
I've already spoken to their CEO; he was too busy to speak then but promised to call me back. I hope he does.
I'm not sure what you mean by this at all, but no, it's not. If it were, I'd be using it. Have you ever read their TOS? It's probably the scariest solution out there. For example, if a public company used it, then there'd be incredible grounds for a stockholders' suit; it basically gives Google free access to all email stored by the company, and makes no affirmative storage attempt.
Jeff
nobaloney
NoBaloney Internet Svcs - In Memoriam †
I've spoken to Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels. He tells me that he'll consider a plugin for DirectAdmin (then he could advertise it on our forums ). He told me current pricing for Webhosting companies; I'll just say that it's more expensive, monthly, than DirectAdmin.
That shouldn't stop you from using it if you can make it a worthwile part of your business model.
I probably won't use it because if I do I'd get lazy, and stop working on SpamBlocker.
Good Luck!
Jeff
). He told me current pricing for Webhosting companies; I'll just say that it's more expensive, monthly, than DirectAdmin.That shouldn't stop you from using it if you can make it a worthwile part of your business model.
I probably won't use it because if I do I'd get lazy, and stop working on SpamBlocker.
Good Luck!
Jeff