• How Swirbo Works
• Service vs. Software
• Requirements
• How Do I Sign Up?

First, a quick tour of how SMTP and DNS work together to deliver e-mail messages:

Typically, when an e-mail client like Outlook Express, for example, is instructed to deliver a message to "joebrown@bigcompany.com", the first thing the client does is hand the message to its "SMTP Server". The SMTP server is the entity responsible for sending mail for the ISP or organization. The first thing it needs to know is where to send the mail. To determine this, it utilizes something in DNS called an "MX record".

Much like an "A (address) record" in DNS is a record that points a name at an IP address -- for example, mail.bigcompany.com to 123.45.67.89 -- an "MX (Mail eXchanger) record" is a record in DNS that points at an A record that tells the rest of the internet which A record to send mail to, for that domain.

So, to decide where to send mail for bigcompany.com, an SMTP server must look up the "MX record" for bigcompany.com. If the "MX record" for bigcompany.com points at "mail.bigcompany.com", the SMTP server knows to contact that host for mail delivery.

Typically, most organizations have one of two configurations:

• The MX record for their domain points at their ISP's SMTP server. Individual e-mail clients at the organization are then configured to download their mail from the ISP's server, using POP, or sometimes IMAP.
• The MX record for their domain points at their own mailserver, typically on a private network behind a smaller internet connection such as a T1, DSL, or Cable.

It's the MX record that allows Swirbo to integrate a spam-filtering service seamlessly into the delivery of e-mail for your organization. Instead of having your MX record point right at your destination mailserver, it points at Swirbo's servers instead. Swirbo has a regimented system of spam-filtering processes, utilizing a variety of techniques, that eliminates spam and viruses, passing only legitimate, clean e-mail to your server.

Maintenance
The general upkeep of the system can be quite costly. Ensuring that filtering is still taking place, tweaking the filter, dealing with improperly labeled mail -- all these things must be taken care of by someone locally, and this manifests itself as lost time and money.

Technology
Not all anti-spam software is created alike. Some software relies on highly proprietary techniques to filter spam, while others draw on common "open" techniques. The best software combines the two, but it's difficult to know specifically what is under the hood, and how this software deals with evolving threats, which brings us to:

Innovation
The spamming community is, unfortunately, a wiley bunch. The techniques used to distribute and deliver spam are ever-changing. Fortunately, so are the techniques to stop it. With a locally-installed software package there is no guarantee that a software package will keep up with the latest threats or incorporate the latest techniques in eliminate spam. Further, if they do, nonetheless, an upgrade will undoubtedly be required:

Upgrades
This means man-power to perform the upgrade, downtime on the mailserver, and potential complications as a result. For example, a few years ago, SpamAssassin, a very popular (and very effective) open-source spam-filtering product released a new version that drastically changed the way they filtered spam -- moving from a keyword/regular-expression based filtering method to "Bayesian" (statistical learning) type filter. Many people upgraded, unaware of this rather drastic change (and the "training" process that determines its effectiveness). As a result, the spam-filtering functionality was virtually nullified for several days until the users realized and made the necessary changes. Imagine this happening on an enterprise-level -- it would result in not too few unhappy campers.

The Swirbo spam-filtering service eliminates these hassles by aggregating all of the work required to maintain a cutting-edge spam-filtering engine into one service for all its customers, addressing all of these concerns:

Maintenance
All of the maintenance on the system is performed by Swirbo. If you choose, no more interaction is required than simply signing up. However, there are facilities for "confirming" mail that passes through Swirbo as either spam or non-spam to increase the efficiency of the filter. You can also peruse your quarantined spam in order to find potential false positives (legitimate mail labeled as spam). However, ultimately, it's a hands-off solution that eliminates your spam problem.

Technology
Swirbo's framework is built to incorporate a multitude of spam-filtering techniques, and we have done so to create a multi-tiered system of defense that e-mail must pass through. We combine a variety of proprietary techniques with the latest in community-driven techniques in fighting spam.

Innovation
Swirbo's expertise is fixated on the latest developments in the abuse of E-mail and the techniques in fighting spam. As new techniques arise for fighting spam they will quickly and efficiently be added to the arsenal of spam-filtering tools (after thorough testing, of course).

Upgrades
Since you have no software to upgrade, obviously this is a non-issue. Further, because Swirbo is a fully-redundant, load-balanced service, any changes, upgrades, and improvements that we make to the system can be done in such a way as to result in no down-time for you.

In addition to alleviating these downsides, the aggregated "service" model has several added benefits:

Statistical training at the aggregate level
What this means is that as more and more users use Swirbo, more and more e-mail is classified as "spam" or "non-spam". Swirbo then constantly trains its anti-spam filter on these e-mails making it more accurate in the future. Because it uses a common database, you benefit from the collective spam-identification of the system as a whole. This is in addition to several systems that utilize spam-identification and classification of the Internet as a whole.

Redundancy
If your mailserver were ever to go down, Swirbo will simply queue your e-mail on our servers until your mailserver is back up and delivery can commence.

Flexibility
Normally, if the IP address of your mailserver should ever change, you would be required to change the "MX record" of your domain in DNS, to tell e-mail to go to the new server. This is a change that takes some time to propagate, because of the way DNS works. This requires you to manage the transition, allowing time for the DNS to transition and possibly keeping both IPs up at the same time (or facing down-time, if not). Because Swirbo's service assumes the role of the "MX record" for your domain, changes like these are more easily accommodated. We can quickly change where we relay your mail -- much quicker than DNS. This may seem like a small benefit, but anyone that has endured such a transition can tell you it can be quite a headache.

Bandwidth savings
On average, Swirbo rejects 50-70% of spam straight away. Further, around 20% of mail beyond that is quarantined as suspected spam. This means that, depending on the extent of your spam problem, 70-90% of your organization's mail will be stopped by Swirbo as spam and never even make it to your mailserver. This translates into savings on mailserver load as well as bandwidth costs saved.

Because Swirbo is service-based spam-filtering, there are very few requirements. However, there is one: to sign up for Swirbo's service, you must have control over your organization's domain name. This is because it requires redirecting all e-mail for the organization's domain name to Swirbo.

1. To get started with Swirbo, first fill out and submit the form on the Sign-Up Page for a free trial.
2. When your order has been processed, you will get an e-mail welcoming you to Swirbo that contains your login credentials. Log in to the web interface at http://spam.swirbo.com/ and familiarize yourself with the system. Be sure to carefully read over the built-in help.
3. The next step is to contact your e-mail provider (usually your ISP), to tell them to change your MX records to point at Swirbo. For your convenience, we have below a sample letter that you can e-mail or fax to your ISP:

   Company Name has subscribed to the Swirbo spam-filtering service (http://www.swirbo.com/). To accommodate this change, we require changing the MX records for Domain Name to the following:

   10 mta1.swirbo.net.
   10 mta2.swirbo.net.

   It's critical that these are the only two MX records listed. A backup MX record will be tried by spammers and viruses first, and will provide a loophole around our spam-filtering service.

   Please contact Contact Name at Contact Telephone Number or Contact E-mail Address to confirm that this change has taken place. Thank you.

4. Once you get confirmation that the MX records have been changed, the new records will take 2-3 days to "propagate" across the internet. This means that you will gradually start to see a trickle of mail go through Swirbo before it gets to you, and that you may still receive some spam during this transitional period. Generally, it will be 4-5 days before you can be certain that the changes are completely in effect.
5. Log in to Swirbo and start training/verifying mail!
6. Note that while all legitimate mail and almost all spam and viruses will now go through Swirbo first, it is still possible for spammers and some worms to contact your mailserver directly. To eliminate this possibility, you should limit access to you mailserver so that no one but Swirbo can deliver mail.