Announcing Lyris MailShield!

• February 12, 1998

Announcing Lyris MailShield!

Oakland, CA - 31 March 1998 - Lyris Technologies Inc. has released MailShield, the first comprehensive server-level anti-spam tool.

Lyris MailShield is a software program plug-in for your current mail server, adding filtering, rejection and programmability features to your existing setup. With MailShield, you can have your mail server identify spam, deny unauthorized mail relaying and halt email bombs.

More than 50 different mail protection are built into MailShield, and more can be added with a simple Perl-like scripting language. Each rule, whether supplied with MailShield or added by the administrator, can be selectively turned on or off.

MailShield is now available for Windows NT, Windows 95, Sun Solaris/SPARC, Sun Solaris/Intel, HP/UX and Irix. We will soon be releasing other Unix versions. MailShield works with all Internet-capable mail servers.

Filters supplied with MailShield include:

Invalid message detection: forged "Date:" header detection, forged Message-Id detection, invalid MAIL FROM domain, invalid "From:" email address, invalid "From:" domain name, invalid "To:" email address, invalid "To:" domain name, missing "To:", "From:" or "Subject:" headers, reject if no hostname (reverse DNS lookup on connecting host), reject source routed email, require valid hostname for HELO, maximum recipients counted in all headers ("To:", "CC:", "BCC:", etc).

Ban Mail by Specifying any Combination of: specific HELO text, MAIL FROM text, RCPT TO text, "From:" header text, "Received:" header text, "Subject:" text, TCP/IP addresses of connecting host, "To:" header text, body text, domain names of connecting hosts, header text, or complete message text (header & body).

Protection from unauthorized relaying: specify hostnames (and/or patterns) of hosts which you want to allow relaying from, allowable TCP/IP addresses (and address ranges), domain names of recipients you do or do not wish to accept, MAIL FROM that you always accept.

Override Options: Parameters which will allow specific email to bypass MailShield by specifying: TCP/IP address, hostnames/domains, MAIL FROM text, RCPT TO text.

Size Limitations: reject any message which exceeds a maximum message size in bytes, maximum message lines of text, maximum number of RCPT TO recipients, or slow down acceptance of any message which has more than a set number of recipients (protects ISPs from their own customers using them to send bulk mail).

Backup Options: backup rejected mail to another server, backup rejected mail to another email account, mark the "Subject:" line with alert flag instead of refusing mail.

Tarpitting: tarpit by domain name (and/or pattern), tarpit TCP/IP addresses, set tarpit delay time.

Logging: MailShield performs extensive logging of all activities, including segmented logging by type (for example: just log refusals, log all SMTP transactions, etc). Option to give helpful refusal messages or terse highly secure refusal messages. Option to give helpful refusal messages or terse refusal messages.

Helpful information: Append helpful SMTP session information in headers (helps track source of mail in case of need for later tracking).

Automatic reload: automatically detects configuration changes (such as a banned domain list), and reloads new settings into cached memory.

About Lyris Technologies, Inc.

Lyris Technologies (http://www.lyris.com) is the developer of Lyris ListManager, the world's best-selling email marketing software. Over 4,000 businesses — from Fortune 500 corporations to fast-growing startups — rely on ListManager for high-performance email campaign management and analytics. Lyris also offers Lyris ListHosting for outsourced email campaigns, the Lyris MailShield software suite for spam protection, and Lyris MailEngine for fast, efficient email delivery. Founded in 1994, Lyris was recently named one of the fastest growing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.