Cloudmark
Proofpoint acquires Cloudmark
Major industry news today as Proofpoint and Cloudmark announced a major acquisition deal. Proofpoint agreed to pay $110 million in cash to acquire Cloudmark. Prior to this acquisition, Proofpoint focused on business filters. Cloudmark’s focus was selling into large ISPs, including large cable providers, and mobile carriers. Proofpoint assured investors they will continue to supporting and developing the Cloudmark filters. At the same time they’re incorporating the Cloudmark Global Threat Network into their Nexus platform.
A few things came to mind when I saw the announcement.
Both companies focused on different types of email filtering. Proofpoint developed products for business, building filters that address spam but they did a lot more. Many of the filter features have nothing to do with blocking mail, but instead focus on other business critical functions like protecting intellectual property and maintaining compliance with various laws and regulations. Cloudmark, on the other hand, created filters that businesses could deploy to protect consumers as well as use in their business
With this acquisition we’re starting to see a consolidation of functionality. The distance between business filters and consumer filters continues to close.
Filtering isn’t just about spam, though.
This acquisition improves Proofpoint’s ability to filter things other than spam. Their announcement specifically calls out spear phishing and business email compromise (BEC) as problems. They are. Criminals steal billions of dollars from businesses through email attacks. These same types of attacks were employed in the 2016 US elections against candidates and parties.
It feels like we’re embarking on a new phase of security and compliance. Those tools we built to deal with spam and protect the internet from abuse generally worked. Our mail infrastructure isn’t falling down due to spam. Now we need to look forward to handling different kinds of abuse. The same people who stepped up to the plate in the early 2000’s to address spam are now looking at how to protect individuals online.
It’s a nice internet we’ve got here. Let’s see if we can keep it.
Filtering secret sauce
It seems one of the most asked questions I hear from people is about filters and what the secret sauce is.
Read MoreCloudmark posted their Global Spam Threat Report for 2013.
Cloudmark Annual Global Messaging Threat Report. Nothing too surprising here, but useful for anyone in the email space to check out.
Read MoreAbuse it and lose it
Last week I blogged about the changes at ISPs that make “ISP Relations” harder for many senders. But it’s not just ISPs that are making it a little more difficult to get answers to questions, some spam filtering companies are pulling back on offering support to senders.
For instance, Cloudmark sent out an email to some ESPs late last week informing them that Cloudmark was changing their sender support policies. It’s not that they’re overwhelmed with delisting requests, but rather that many ESPs are asking for specific data about why the mail was blocked. In December, Spamcop informed some ESPs that they would stop providing data to those ESPs about specific blocks and spam trap hits.
These decisions make it harder for ESPs to identify specific customers and lists causing them to get blocked. But I understand why the filtering companies have had to take such a radical step.
Support for senders by filtering companies is a side issue. Their customers are the users of the filtering service and support teams are there to help paying customers. Many of the folks at the filtering companies are good people, though, and they’re willing to help blocked senders and ESPs to figure out the problem.
For them, providing information that helps a company clean up is a win. If an ESP has a spamming customer and the information from the filtering company is helping the ESP force the customer to stop spamming that’s a win and that’s why the filtering companies started providing that data to ESPs.
Unfortunately, there are people who take advantage of the filtering companies. I have dozens of stories about how people are taking advantage of the filtering companies. I won’t share specifics, but the summary is that some people and ESPs ask for the same data over and over and over again. The filtering company rep, in an effort to be helpful and improve the overall email ecosystem, answers their questions and sends the data. In some cases, the ESP acts on the data, the mail stream improves and everyone is happy (except maybe the spammer). In other cases, though, the filtering company sees no change in the mail stream. All the filtering company person gets is yet another request for the same data they sent yesterday.
Repetition is tedious. Repetition is frustrating. Repetition is disheartening. Repetition is annoying.
What we’re seeing from both Spamcop and Cloudmark is the logical result from their reps being tired of dealing with ESPs that aren’t visibly fixing their customer spam problems. Both companies are sending some ESPs to the back of the line when it comes to handling information requests, whether or not those ESPs have actually been part of the problem previously.
The Cloudmark letter makes it clear what they’re frustrated about.
World IPv6 launch day
Today is world IPv6 launch day. A group of ISPs, network hardware manufacturers and web companies permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services.
What’s this got to do with email? According to a post on the NANOG mailing list the very first email to arrive at the Comcast IPv6 mailserver was received a minute after the server was turned on. This email was spam and was caught by Cloudmark’s filters.
Comcast goes on to assure readers that more mail came in and not all of it was spam.
But, yes, the first email sent to Comcast over IPv6 was spam. Welcome to the future.
News from MAAWG
During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different.
Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security hole that is blocked, spammers will search for another hole to exploit. The unfortunate truth is that end user is the weak point, and spammers and scammers are very very good at social engineering.
Spam statistics stalemate. Spam is still accounting for approximately 90% of all email traffic.
Cloudmark acquires Bizanga. I talked to some of the Cloudmark folks and they seem very excited with their acquisition of the Bizanga MTA and email technology.
Bizanga Storage announced. Bizanga Store is a scalable storage system brought to you by some of the people who were instrumental in building the Bizanga MTA acquired by Cloudmark.
ReturnPath announced partnership with RPost. Yet more ongoing changes in the certification field.