Homegrown software firm Spamjadoo keeps the inbox intact

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.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Internet_/Homegrown_software
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