Email Security Vendor Goes Zombie Hunting

Reflexion Outbound Mail Auditing screens outbound email and allows administrators to implement rate-over-time volume limits, with automatic alerts triggered to warn of open relay conditions and compromised zombie endpoints, said Reflexion CEO David Hughes.

"Small businesses can have their IP addresses blacklisted when a zombie is sending out tens of thousands of emails from one of their PCs or their mail server is compromised and becomes an open relay," Hughes said.

Version 5.0 of the Woburn, Mass.-based vendor's product also includes a private labeling feature that allows partners to switch out the Reflexion logo for their own throughout the interface, co-administration capabilities, user extraction from any LDAP directory and more advanced diagnostic tools.

The upgraded service will be sold to partners at no additional cost, said Hughes. Total Control starts at $1.50 per-user, per-month, with the price decreasing as a solution provider's cumulative users increase. The service's inbound email filtering includes traditional whitelisting and content filtering, as well as its Address-on-the-Fly feature, which permits the use of more than one address for a single inbox to protect a user's primary address and avoid false positives.

Hughes and Reflexion vice president of sales and marketing Scott Barlow attended the recent MSP Alliance Conference in Orlando, Fla., part of Reflexion's strategy to focus exclusively on the channel, said Barlow.

"We win when our channel partners win. It's that simple," said Barlow. By targeting small to midsized MSPs, Reflexion hopes to distinguish itself from larger hosted messaging vendors like MessageLabs and Postini, he said.

Partners like Performance Connectivity in Port Chester, N.Y., appreciate the channel focus of Reflexion.

"They added a lot of stuff in the 5.0 version that we wanted. I joke with Scott [Barlow] about it, he calls it the 'Wayne release' because they added so many features that we bugged them about," said Wayne Libonati, Performance Connectivity vice president and head of managed services.

Libonati said Performance Connectivity, which has managed services customers in the 10-100 desktop range throughout the Tri-State area, sells spam filtering to the majority of its clients. The addition of several new features to the Reflexion service is welcome, he said, though less than half of Performance Connectivity's customers use the more complex existing features, such as address-on-the-fly.

"The savvy users use those features, the simple users don't want to be bothered," Libonati said. "A good 40 percent of our accounts use address-on-the-fly on a regular basis. Those are the people who have real spam issues."