Mail Cruncher Brings Business Trust Ratings to Anti-Spam
Mail Cruncher, a new anti-spam subscription service, relies on a "business trust rating" database called the Outbound Index. Email is sorted based on facts such as domain age, relationships between server and domain, and sender stability.
Jamestown, RI (PRWEB via PR Web
Direct) September 22, 2004 -- "In business, I decide to trust other
companies based on how long they have been around, their location, who else does
business with them, and their record of reliability," says April Lorenzen,
creator of the Mail Cruncher service. "We just applied the same common sense
to sorting email. Our customers say it works well for them,
saving time and aggravation every day."
Spammers tend to hide and move;
legitimate business senders tend to be stable and clearly identifiable. This
common-sense observation was the basis for work done by an international team
over the past three years. Led by Ms. Lorenzen, the team's work culminated in
the creation of a business trust rating database for email called the Outbound
Index.
The Mail Cruncher email sorting service uses
Outbound Index ratings exclusively to sort email. Messages with a high rating go
immediately to the subscriber's inbox. Messages with a low rating are held back.
Once a day, Mail Cruncher subscribers are sent an email with a sorted,
color-coded list of suspicious emails that can be scanned in seconds.
"My inbox stays cleaner, and I don't lose mail I want to get," says Fran
Microulis, a Web site administrator for American Biophysics Corporation. "Once a
day I get a single email with the Mail Cruncher list. Even if there are one
hundred messages on the list, I can look it over in less than a minute, deleting
everything I don't want with one click. I used to spend at least a half hour a
day trying to figure out what was spam in my inbox and
getting rid of it."
The Mail Cruncher list has several features that make
it easy for subscribers to quickly scan and take action on suspicious
messages:
- Domains are grouped, so if a subscriber receives 17 messages
from the same domain, the messages appear together for faster skimming.
-
Appearing at the top of the color-coded list are any messages that have been
marked as wanted in the past. Messages from new senders are displayed in the
middle of the list. Senders whose messages have been deleted in the past appear
at the bottom.
- The sender's user name, such as "nwyiyvq," is
displayed, not just the often-misleading name ("Victoria") shown by most email
inboxes. Seeing a user name such as "nwyiyvq," the subscriber can immediately
realize the message is not from the "Victoria" he knows. Subscribers say this
feature alone saves countless "is it or isn't it?" hours every month.
-
If a subscriber isn't sure if a message is spam or not, she can read the text of
the message safely within the Mail Cruncher environment--without triggering
webbugs or attached viruses, without displaying any objectionable images that
might be in spam, and without the sender knowing the email was opened.
An
actual Mail Cruncher list with the above features can be seen and tried on the
web at http://MailCruncher.com/demo.cfm
Mail Cruncher has been
in use by the customers of FullScaleCommerce.com, a Rhode Island ISP, for the
past several months. Subscribers say they are pleased to be free from the deluge
of spam, and also like the fact that it is easy for them to double-check the
list of "suspicious" messages quickly once a day for any messages they wanted to
receive.
"In the time I have used Mail Cruncher, all of the emails it
sorted out were emails I really didn't want," says Robert Umbenhauer, owner of
the East Ferry Deli. "It certainly is a better alternative than changing my
email address, which I was seriously considering."
Mail Cruncher Service
Available Now
The Mail Cruncher service is available immediately at http://MailCruncher.com. The
cost is $3 per mailbox, per month. The service is open to any business with an
internet domain name of its own. FullScaleCommerce.com can also help business
subscribers obtain a domain name if they don't have one already. Subscribers can
use the Mail Cruncher service risk-free for a full 60 days.
Why the
Outbound Index Uses Objective Rating Criteria
One of the reasons the
Outbound Index doesn't look at the content of the email message is because many
legitimate senders use terms coincidentally found in spam. "Real estate
companies send and receive many legitimate messages with the word 'mortgage' in
them," says Ms. Lorenzen. "The Outbound Index makes it much easier for these
companies to continue conducting business via email, in spite of the 'spam-like'
content of their legitimate messages."
Outbound Index ratings do not
depend on subjective judgements about words in the message or muddy permission
issues. The Outbound Index ratings used by Mail Cruncher are based
principally on statistical facts such as domain age, relationships between
server and domain, and sender stability.
Who Created the Outbound
Index
An international team of developers, hailing from Romania, France,
Malta, USA, and Australia have spent the last three years working together on
the Outbound Index, under Ms. Lorenzen's guidance and with advice from Internet
veterans, including author Derek J. Balling and former AOL Senior Internet Mail
Systems Administrator Brad Knowles. The majority of software utilized throughout
the Outbound Index is open source, including Twisted Framework Python,
Postgresql, Sendmail, and Debian Linux. "We chose open source where possible,
for reasons of higher performance, customizability, and the excellent support
available 24/7," says Ms. Lorenzen.
Media contact:
Kristin
Zhivago
888-894-3896
e-mail protected from spam bots
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/9/prweb161107.htm