Anti-spam approach for New Millenium

Developer New Millennium Solutions has started building an Australia-based reseller channel with an eye to boosting exposure and sales for its anti-spam software TotalBlock.

Peter Stewart, chief executive at New Millennium Solutions, said the Sydney-based ISV had so far signed up Misnet, a reseller in the Philippines, about a year ago but wanted to set up an Australian channel.

TotalBlock was released commercially February 2004 and the company felt it should start attacking the market more proactively, he said.

The Philippino signing had come about simply because New Millenium Solutions had been in the right place at the right time and Misnet had shown interest, he said.

"That was serendipity, really," Stewart said. "Misnet is pretty significant in Manila."

TotalBlock did not filter spam the way other vendors' applications did. TotalBlock was more like a whitelist or safe list system where unknown emails were bounced back, he said.

Senders got a message in their inboxes asking if they were sending legitimate mail, and if so, to do a couple of things to authorise their email. If those steps were followed correctly, TotalBlock permitted the email, Stewart said.

"You put the responsibility for the mail back on the sender," he said.

Stewart said the company came up with the idea after experiencing its own spam crisis, with a hundred or so unwanted, unsolicited emails arriving in individual inboxes a day.

"We found that completely unmanageable," he said.

He conceded that businesspeople might fear losing genuine emails along with the spam.

But, unlike some other anti-spam systems that only permitted email from authorised senders, TotalBlock queried the sender so he or she could protest the exclusion and overturn it so genuine business contacts could get their mail through, he said.

Stewart said TotalBlock could provide welcome relief for businesses or individuals suffering from heavy spamming. He said he believed users could reasonably expect to virtually eliminate spam by using the application.

New Millenium Solutions would split "everything" half and half with distributors, and offer 25 percent to resellers who spotted a sales opportunity, he said.

Stewart said the nine-year-old ISV had developed several other products over the years, such as CrossView, a product used for computer service management.

It had also done a suite for batching and transmission of financial transactions, dubbed Secure eSolutions, and had an arm devoted to developing VoIP services and delivery systems.