It’s been way too long since the last post.  All I can say is that we’ve been very, very busy.  Of course, in this (and any) economy, busy is good.  Ok, here’s what we’ve been up to…

We are pleased to announce that we have completed the migration of all customers over to our new distributed cloud based spam filtering environment.  We always knew that this was the direction we wanted to go in, even before our service was launched.   However, since we are used to dealing with very reliable data centers, the first release of our service wasn’t cloud based and simply used relay servers as an emergency fallback.  The original system looked like this:

The location 2 and 3 servers were only engaged when there was a problem with location 1, which ensured that no email was ever lost.  However, since these locations only hosted relay servers, in the event of trouble they had to wait for the primary server at location 1 to come back online, which could cause email delays.

Our new distributed cloud filtering system resolves this problem:

This configuration splits up incoming email for each domain between two totally separate data centers, using round robin DNS MX records for the primary MX record (“MX 1″).  In the event that one of these locations has trouble, the “MX 2″ and “MX 3″ records point directly to the two locations so that sending mail servers will always be able to find an available server to send to.   Since this design eliminates the need of relay servers, this eliminates most any threat of email delays. Yay!

Oh, and this setup only requires 3 MX records, but, we’ve added support for a fourth.  The fourth record will be used when we expand the distributed cloud to include three locations.  For now, the “MX 4″ record mirrors “MX 1″ but will later point to the third location.   To take advantage of the third location when it comes online, you will need to update your MX records according to the instructions now displayed on the Settings -> mail host page when you login to the SpamHero back office.

If this upgrade doesn’t look like that big of a deal, then perhaps it’s because the sketch above is a little too simplified.   This was a big project for us, and it held up a lot of other projects and upgrades that we’ve been anxious to get to.   For example, one upgrade it had held up was a speed increase for those users with very large quarantines… if you are one of those users, you’ll notice a huge speed increase there.

With this distributed cloud project out of the way, you should see a steady flow of improvements and new features again.   I’ll try to make mention of some of the more notable ones here as they are rolled out.

We’ve seen a lot of people switching over from Postini to SpamHero as of late.  I don’t want to make this a list of things that are wrong with Postini, because that’s not our style.  So, instead, we asked people who made the switch to tell us what they like about SpamHero.  Here is what they said:

We are easy to reach.
Just click on chat, pick up the phone or drop us an email for immediate help during regular business hours.   Or, even during some “not so regular” business hours.  And we’re working on having around the clock support.

Our Web 2.0 user interface is easy to use and looks great.
Resellers who have switched over to our service are happy that they can offer their customers an interface that isn’t stale and clumsy looking.

We do an amazing job filtering spam.
This should probably go first, but I think people find the first two items so refreshing that it takes them a while to even notice that making the switch to SpamHero has reduced the amount of time they have to deal with missed spam.

We don’t lose good email.
When a Postini customer switches over, one of the first things they ask is whether they can view spam that was blocked.  And, yes, we do provide a message quarantine which I’m assuming is the similar to Postini’s message center.  Only ours is really pretty.  But, we don’t expect customers to have to spend much time there.  We only put spam in there.  The good stuff is delivered to the customer’s mail server.

We don’t charge a per mailbox fee.
A company with over 210 email boxes signed up the other day.  You can guess how happy they were to find us.

We listen to our customers.
A few customers told us that they’d like a report of spam that was blocked from their email boxes on a schedule of their choosing.  So we added the feature.

Instant setup.
You can literally have your account set up and filtering spam in the next five minutes.  Apparently, *ahem* elsewhere, you have to wait a few days.

I’ll probably come back and add to this list later.  In fact, if you’ve made the switch from Postini, we welcome your feedback.  Let us know why you made the switch and what you like best about our service.  Think of something we can do better?  Let us know… we’re listening.

Get a free test drive.
Or, if you are a current Postini user, and want to see for yourself, take a 30 day free test drive of our service.

I was talking to a potential customer the other day who admitted that before he called us, he was wondering if our company had died.  Why?  Because we had not posted anything on our blog recently.  Oops.

It was our intention to update this blog regularly, but as things got busy we forgot to make it a priority.  So, I am making a very late 2010 new year’s resolution to check in here at least once a month.  I’d like to say once per week, but we’ll see.  I’ve never been into blogging, and while I fire off dozens of emails every day, writing a blog entry is pretty intimidating to me because of the fact that whatever I say will get permanently indexed.  It’s feels like I’m writing in stone.  Oh well, based on how important it is for businesses to be as transparent as possible, I will try to get over this fear and just start posting.  If I get something wrong, I can always write a follow up article, right?

The other fear I have is that I’ll write something that will tip off our competition.   I know, I’m worrying way too much about this.  It’s not like the competition couldn’t learn anything they wanted about us by just signing up for an account with our service.  Besides, all our competition would need to do to find out what they need to work on would be to listen their own customers.   Right now most of our new customers are leaving competitors for our service.    These new customers are providing us with a lot of feedback about what they liked about the service they left and the things they didn’t like.  It is that feedback that is driving the continued development of our service.

In future posts, I will be writing about many of the existing features of our service, new features as they are released, and what features we are looking to add.    Right now, based on how little information we’ve posted on our site about all the great features of SpamHero, one might think invisibility was what we were looking to achieve here.   Although invisibility would be a pretty cool super power to have, it’s probably not the best business model.  Transparency sounds a little like invisibility, but comes closer to what we’re trying to achieve, so we’ll try to nurture that super power instead.    As always, I welcome your feedback.

Good news!  As of today, our affiliate program is online!  For each customer that you refer to SpamHero, we’ll pay $30.  That’s over 50% of the annual subscription cost of the service!

We’re excited about the feedback we’re receiving and we want your help spreading the word. We’ve found that some people are scared off by our low price,  but, if they hear about the service from someone they know, then they’re a lot more likely to give it a try.

Our aim is to revolutionize the spam filtering industry by offering superior performance and service at a substantially lower price.  When people see how well the SpamHero service works, they’ll be totally hooked.

Learn more here: SpamHero affiliate program

Sign up here: Signup as an affiliate (free)

Let’s save the world from spam together!

Best regards,

The O’Reilly Brothers (Jeremy & Curtis)
SpamHero Founders

Some have said that we’ll never win the fight against spam.  And they probably never will.  But SpamHero is unique, even revolutionary.  We designed it from the ground up to resolve the problems that plague other spam filtering services.  Here are the top 10 problems we saw with the other companies in this industry:

Mistake #1: Make bogus claims about how accurate their filter is.

We tested high and low.  Most of the filters we tested only caught between 50% – 75% of the spam (even the ones that claimed to catch 99% or more).  SpamHero consistently catches over 98.5% of the bad stuff.  The details on how we accomplish this is worthy of it’s own blog entry so I’ll have to get back to that soon.

Mistake #2: Throw away a lot of your good mail as “spam”.

Even companies that claim to specialize in this area seem to fail miserably–ouch.  It’s probably because they take the same out-dated approach to filtering.  We do things differently.

This topic also deserves it’s own entry so instead of getting into the technical side of it I’ll just ask: Have you ever seen someone win the lottery?  Probably not.  And you’re even less likely to see SpamHero trash a good message.  While scanning over a half billion messages per day, our filtering engine averages less than 10 false positives.  That’s less than 1 in 10 million.  Not bad.  For the average email user that’s less than 1 good message being lost in 100 years.

Mistake #3: Makes you look like a spammer to the rest of the world.

To keep things simple most spam filters will accept email that is sent to any address at your domain.  Unfortunately, spammers like to impersonate domains that have this feature enabled.  As a result, millions of people around the world could be receiving spam that has your domain listed as the sender’s email address.  That certainly can’t be good for your image.

Of course, we love the idea of keeping things simple.  So we designed a smarter solution that gives you the best of both worlds.  By default we leave the email ‘catch-all’ feature turned on for the first 30 days (you can force it to stay on if you prefer).  During that time our system automatically learns what email addresses are valid for your domain.  The catch-all feature is automatically shut off after 30 days and we only accept mail for your valid email addresses from then on.

Mistake #4: Make your domain a bigger target for spammers.

Recently a customer that was moving to SpamHero from another filtering service forwarded a message from the other company.  They were trying to win back their customer by pointing out that their domain had received over 600,000 spam messages so far that month.

Since we were already filtering mail for this new customer I decided to investigate.  It turned out that in less than 24 hours spammers had sent mail to over 1,000 unique email addresses on this customer’s domain (the customer had less than a dozen “valid” remail addresses).

This is something spammers like to do to domains that have the ‘catch-all’ feature turned on.  Fortunately, our service automatically detects the valid email addresses and shuts off this dangerous feature.  So I calculated that this customer would cut down their inbound email volume from over 600,000 messages per month to around 5,000 messages per month–just by switching to our service.

On a side note, these kinds of practices can falsely inflate a spam filter’s accuracy
rating.  I won’t go into the logic of how this works but I’ll offer a hint: it has to do with spammers sending 99% of the spam to invalid addresses on your domain.

Mistake #5: “Tuning, tweaking and training, oh my!”

Unless you’re an IT expert then the idea of tuning your spam filter probably sounds daunting (and with good reason).  Some services ask you to train their filter so they know what “your” spam looks like.  That’s rubbish.

We wouldn’t stand for such non-sense.  SpamHero goes undercover to spy on what the spammers are up to.  Our distributed network of spam traps instantly detects and adapts to the latest spam storms.  No tuning, training or tweaking required.

Mistake #6: Charge setup fees and per email box fees.

With the level of automation that exists today there is really no excuse for a “setup fee”.  Oh yeah, and if you have more than a few email addresses on your domain they want you to pay extra for that too.

That’s all old-school thinking.  We’d rather focus on giving our customer as much value for their dollar as possible.

Mistake #7: Charge an extra fee to view the spam that’s been filtered.

Yes, most companies charge an extra fee for the “message quarantine” feature.   Perhaps they’re concerned that if you could see what they’ve marked as “spam” you might notice how much of your good mail they’re actually throwing away.

We’ve got nothing to hide.  People will generally see Halley’s Comet more often than a good message being caught in their SpamHero quarantine.

Mistake #8: Require you to call or fill out a form to get a price.

This one doesn’t affect long-term service but it always makes me wonder what  they trying to hide.  It’s amazing to me how many companies still take this old-fashioned approach.

People don’t like being left in the dark.  So we’ve tried to make SpamHero as transparent as possible.  It just makes more sense.

Mistake #9: Signup today, they’ll get back to you some time… next week?

A lot of spam filtering services take several days to get setup from the day you fill out their order form.  Is that due to poor design or lazyness?  Not sure but we feel that’s totally unacceptable.

We had 3 design goals when we created our order & setup process:
1) Must be simple to get started (intuitive order process, etc)
2) Services must activate immediately upon ordering
2) Entire process should take 5 minutes or less

Mistake #10: Innovation not included.

Before we began creating our service we did a lot of research.  One thing we noticed among many of the older spam filtering companies is that their website (or control panel) looked like it was created in the 90’s (and never updated since).  And this is something we’ve encountered in most industries.  It seems that once a company reaches a certain point they get comfortable and stop innovating.

We’ve got a huge list of features we plan to implement.  Check back often and watch us as we show what we’re made of. 

Here we go!   Today we celebrate the official launch of our service.  We’ve had an extra long beta test and have had lots of positive feedback from our beta testers.  It’s time to unleash SpamHero on the world.

To kick things off, we’re offering new customers that sign up in our first month (between now and October 15) an entire year of free service.   We even put a out a cheesy press release about it.

Our hope is that by offering our service for free, that we’ll be able to employ the power of word-of-mouth advertising.  We’ve seen the technique work for other successful start-ups, and so we figure we might as well give it a go.  Besides, the only time you can make “crazy” offers like this is in the beginning.  I suppose you could try it after having your doors open for a while, but it seems to me that you might upset some of your loyal paying customers a bit (unless you offer them some free time too).

Internet domain owners get extended ‘test drive’ on new service

Henderson, Nevada – Sept. 15, 2009 – Curtis and Jeremy O’Reilly, brothers and long-time veterans in the web-hosting sector, are celebrating the release of SpamHero, a “hosted spam filter” for domain owners, by giving away a free year of service to all customers who sign up by Oct. 15.

SpamHero boasts enterprise level features, including a Web 2.0 interface for viewing “quarantined” spam, and superior spam filtering over traditional anti-spam solutions.  Even at the regular price of just $4.95 per month for domain-wide spam filtering, with no limit on the number of email accounts, the service is a fraction of what other solutions cost.

“At first, we were a little concerned some people might be scared off by the low cost,” said Jeremy O’Reilly, “but with SpamHero’s no-risk free year of service, we’re giving customers plenty of time to see how effective and accurate our filter really is.”

According to a recent report by Microsoft, spam now accounts for more than 97% of email that is sent. Another report on iTWire said spam volume records set last summer were broken again in 2009.

“Combine these factors with the ever-increasing need for businesses to cut costs and boost productivity, the timing of SpamHero’s arrival on the scene couldn’t be better,” Curtis O’Reilly noted.

But what makes SpamHero different is not just the low cost.  SpamHero is powered by a “team of human spam-fighting technicians who are updating the filter rules several times a day.  Over 2 million rules have been compiled so far,” Curtis O’Reilly explained.   “This also ensures that real email does not get blocked by ‘robotic’ algorithms that can sometimes mistake real email for spam.”

Jeremy O’Reilly added: “And, since SpamHero is a hosted solution, it requires no new hardware or software installed at a client’s location.”

Upon subscribing, SpamHero customers update their domain’s “MX record,” which then re-routes all email for the domain through SpamHero’s servers where it is cleaned of spam before arriving at the customer’s mail server.

“The change is so simple to implement and email is free from 99% of spam within 5 minutes,” said Curtis O’Reilly.

“Spammers continue to find innovative ways to get around traditional anti-spam techniques.  If your business isn’t protected by a filtering solution that is actively monitored and improved, prepare to be buried in spam,” Curtis O’Reilly warned.

Curtis and Jeremy O’Reilly decided to develop SpamHero after 13 years in the web hosting industry and witnessing first hand the frustrations that business owners have over the cost of fighting spam, and the lackluster performance of existing solutions.

We had a goal to launch SpamHero by the end of Spring.   Saturday was the last day of Spring, so in honor of our goal, we opened the site for business on Friday for an hour or two, so that we could say we made that goal.   Of course, we didn’t tell anyone about the site opening, and so nobody had a chance to try out the service.  We got to do a little testing using the live site and then we then shut down the site until today so that we could enjoy Father’s Day weekend without wondering if anyone was poking around on our new site.   But, hey, we “launched” in Spring for at least an hour, and therefore made our goal!   Is that cheating? 

When we set our goal to launch in the Spring, it was late 2008, and we thought we’d have no problem getting this out by Spring.  However, since we’re perfectionists, we continually found things that we wanted to get right before we’d even consider a beta launch.

We think we got a lot of things right.  SpamHero is a spam filter that both does a good job and doesn’t break the bank.  We’ve looked high and low… and of all the spam filters out there, we feel SpamHero is the only one that does a really good job, includes some enterprise level features, and is competitive cost wise.

We’re going to take it easy about spreading the word about our beta launch, and just invite a few people to check it out in the first week.  Our official launch will probably be around July 1st. But, if you’re lucky enough to have found us before then, feel free to sign up!  The system is completely automated and will get you started right away.  Be sure to let us know if you see anything that looks out of place.

To sign up as a beta customer, just click on the Free Trial link and you’ll be good to go.  We don’t expect to have a long beta period, and may go into official launch by July 1st.  However, for anyone that does sign up during the beta period, we’ll restart your trial period on the official launch day.

We’re excited!  We look forward to making your life spam free!

– Curtis O’Reilly
co-founder, SpamHero

P.S. We’ll be sharing our adventures of marketing SpamHero to the masses here in our blog, and hopefully sharing some of our marketing ideas along the way.  Stay tuned.