|
They say technology brings
people closer. But how close do you really want to get
to a credit card salesman, a 'discount drugs' pharmacist
or a chain mailer? Spammers have not just made the
Internet a more unpleasant place. Taking the fight back
to the spammers is a small Indian company that calls
itself Spamjadoo.
Spamjadoo was born in 2002, but its roots go back to
1999 when Data Infocom Limited (DIL) was founded
by-believe it or not-a young techie called Dr Data, and
that too in Jaipur, known more for its breathtaking
palaces than IT whizkids.
Ajay Data started DIL, an Internet Service Provider
(ISP), in Jaipur five years after doing his Ph.D. in
electronic data processing. Like all ISPs, DIL issued
free email IDs to each of its customers. However,
complaints soon began pouring in about the large number
of spam mails that users were getting in their inboxes.
"We tested several anti-spam software solutions but none
worked satisfactorily," says Data. The reason was that
most spam-fighting software use a filtering mechanism,
which relies on electronic 'signatures'-predetermined
characteristics peculiar to spam mail-which are then
stored in databases. So if an email has certain words
that are blacklisted by the software, it is
automatically categorised as spam and shoved into a junk
or trash folder. "But what bothered me was that none of
these software guaranteed 100% spam blockage because
what is spam for one person is useful to another, and
the software cannot risk deleting emails that may be
important. We, on the other hand, set out to develop a
product that would not just filter, but also intercept
and block spam."
Three years of research by a 20-member team culminated
in Spamjadoo. Spamjadoo is built on the J2EE
architecture and works on the ESP (Eliminate Spam at
Protocol level) principle, says Data. Simply put, it
validates the sender's email address and lets in mail
only if it's legitimate. Spamjadoo uses two main tools
to control spam. The first one is called 'Route MX
check', which checks to see whether the domain is
configured to send and receive emails. A website that
sends spam, unlike legitimate sites, wouldn't have this
service enabled on it. The second one is auto detection
of a directory harvest attack, where the software, on
detecting five emails sent to non-existent users on a
domain (such as your company domain), blocks the sender
for an hour to observe if more such random mails are
being sent.
Spamjadoo uses no open source (readymade software
components) “and comes with a company guarantee that
you'll never get another spam email,” says Data. “The
email is intercepted by the Spamjadoo server and deleted
before it reaches your inbox. You just install and
forget it.” It may sound like a tall claim, but
Spamjadoo is already working with some big clients like
MTNL in Delhi and Mumbai, and has even signed an
agreement with the National Informatics Centre Services
Inc. (NICSI) to implement the software.
The anti-spam industry is estimated to be worth $20
billion worldwide. And, the Rs 35-crore Spamjadoo,
growing at 100% year-on-year, is hoping to take over a
quarter of the market in India by next year. “Our
challenge now is to build artificial intelligence into
Spamjadoo so that it records user behaviour and uses it
to do a better job," says Data. |
