Outbound Spam Protection
Quick Reference Guide
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Introduction
This document is part of a series of documents designed to assist Commtouch Partners in their sales
efforts. The following describes the features and key points to highlight on Commtouch Outbound
Spam Protection (OSP). In this document you’ll find the following:

Background: How Outbound Spam Affects Service Providers & their Customers

Features of Commtouch Outbound Spam

Qualifying Prospects for Outbound Spam

Common Objections to Outbound Spam

Key Customer Wins/Testimonials for Outbound Spam Protection
Background: How Outbound Spam Affects Service Providers & their
Customers
It is only recently that Outbound spam has become a topic of discussion, yet the effects of outgoing
spam have been felt by service and hosting providers for some time.
The direct effect of Outbound spam is service providers and hosters having their IP ranges blocked, in
what is known as Blacklisting or being Blacklisted. The origin of the name comes from the fact that the
IP ranges end up on IP Blacklists – IP ranges that have been deemed dangerous for some reason or
another. For end-users, the result of blacklisting is that they are not able to send or receive email.
The following table provides an outline of the pains that providers feel as a result of outbound spam:
Key Issues
Additional Information
Raises the costs of providing services

Increased helpdesk calls from customers who have
had their email blocked.

Blocked customers need to be switched to new,
unblocked IP addresses until the block is removed.

Support/systems time to find the cause of a blocked
IP, mitigate the cause, request removal from the
blacklist or blacklists (there may also be multiple
blacklists involved, each run by different
organizations) and damage control with customers.

Credits issued to customers affected by a blockage.

Unhappy customers.

Potential loss of existing customers.

Bad reputation with the general public leads to loss
of potential customers.
Damaged business reputation and
impact on revenue
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Added costs of removing IPs from
blacklists
There are a number of different Blacklists in use in the
industry. The process of clearing an IP from one or more
blacklist can be very time consuming and thus costly.
Extra resources needed to scrutinize
new customers

Sales staff having to worry about their new found
customer.

Billing, wondering if they are accepting payment
from a nasty customer.

Support while they review IP address requests.
Fewer resources/less time needed
to scrutinize new customers
In an attempt to keep spammers out of their network,
many service providers employ additional checks on new
customers. Knowing that outbound spam will be blocked
from leaving their network, service providers can save on
the resources and time needed for these additional
checks.
For example:

Sales staff spend less time having to analyze new and
potential customers

Billing spends less time checking if they are accepting
payment from a nasty customer

Fewer Support resources are needed to review IP address
requests.
Features of Commtouch Outbound Spam Protection
The following table provides the main features of Commtouch Outbound Spam Protection. Next to each
feature you will find the key points to highlight when discussing with your customers along with
completive information.
Feature
Key Points
Competitive Points
Dedicated Outbound
Spam Solution
OSP has been specifically designed to
combat outbound spam – detecting
local, low volume and global spam as
well as identifying the spammers,
with almost no false positives.
Reversed inbound spam solutions
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
These solutions are optimized for
global detection of inbound spam
and hence suffer from low catch
rates and high FPs when used for
outbound spam detection.
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
Are slow to detect outbound spam.

Have no means of identifying the
source of the spam.
Blocking Port 25

Can be a very effective solution,
only it is not feasible for all
customers, especially enterprise
customers that have their own mail
servers.

Does not provide a solution to
compromised accounts or other
techniques that exploit the service
provider’s MTA.

Creates an administrative
nightmare for service providers
trying to control access on a case by
case basis.

Provides no means of identifying
the source of the spam.
Throttling (setting limits on the emails
sent per time period or the number of
recipients)

Spammers can keep sending a slow
flow of spam emails, without
getting blocked, as long as they
remain below the set thresholds.
Often spammers will test the limits
of an outbound spam solution to
find what the throttling limits are
and then remain below this level.
Rapid and accurate
detection
Use of RPD technology means
spam is immediately detected.
Other solutions are not optimized for
outbound spam, so detection may
require significant time.
Identifies the
spammer
OSP is the only solution that, in
addition to blocking the spam,
helps to detect the compromised
accounts, zombie PCs and
spammers sending the spam.
Other solutions and techniques have
no means to detect the spammer,
hence only deal with the symptom
and not the root problem.
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Prevents blacklisting
By ensuring that outbound spam
is immediately detected and
blocked, service providers’ IP
ranges maintain a good
reputation.
Delays in detecting and blocking
outbound spam means that some
spam ill get out and put IPs at risk of
being blacklisted.
Evades evasion
techniques
RPD technology operating on
pattern detection, which is able to
identify evasion techniques.
Spammers may attempt to
circumvent outbound spam
protection by testing the rate at
which mass emails can be released,
or the maximum quantity that can
be released at one time, to evade
throttling and/or rate limit controls.
Such techniques can be effective at
getting around other outbound
solutions. RPD is able to track and
block such techniques.
Qualifying Prospects for Outbound Spam Protection
Prospects for outbound spam protection are:


ISPs and Hosting Providers who regularly have to deal with blacklisting caused by outbound
spam.
Companies that get blacklisted due to compromised internal accounts sending spam.
Probing Questions to Ask Prospects
The following table provides a list of questions you can use to probe your prospects on how outbound
spam affects them and how they are currently dealing with it.
Subject
Questions
Blacklisting
How often do you get blacklisted due to outbound spam?
What happens when you get blacklisted and how long does it
take to get the issue resolved?
What resources does it take to get off the blacklist and get?
Source of outbound spam
How often do your user accounts get compromised?
What do you do with offending accounts that are sending
spam?
How easy is it for you to identify offending spam accounts?
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Current methods to deal with
Outbound Spam
What do you do now to control outbound spam?
How effective would you rate those techniques?
What works well for you?
What else would you like to be able to do to control spam?
Common Objections to Outbound Spam Protection
Below are a number of common objections you may face when discussing Commtouch’s Outbound
Spam Protection solution:
Objection
Response
"I already use [rate limiting]
[throttling][other techniques] to
stop outbound spam."
How effective has that been? Has rate limiting impacted
other legitimate aspects of your operations, like blocking,
delaying or hindering legitimate mail traffic? How important
is it to detect and disconnect the actual spammers?
"I just use my in-bound
antispam to filter outbound
traffic."
Great. How often do you get blacklisted? What kind of false
positive rate do you have and how does that disrupt your
operations and your customers’ business when you have
them? Why is acceptable to catch about 80% of the spam but
not remove the spammer (the root cause)?
“You’re too expensive. We can
handle it manually”
Walk me through the process of what happens when you get
blacklisted from a spam run? Who tends to the outbound
mail queue? Do you have an automated process to clear it?
How long does that take and typically when does it happen?
What happens to legitimate mail while that queue is being
repaired? Who is responsible for contacting the blacklister to
get removed from the list? How long does that typically
happen? How do you identify the offending account and
what do you do about it? Have you ever been blacklisted
because a customer was sending large amounts of legitimate
email, like newsletters? What happened then? How many
customers have you lost due to blacklisting?
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Customer Wins/Testimonials for Outbound Spam Protection
When speaking to prospects, it is always good to provide customer examples and testimonials. Below
are several testimonials from Commtouch partners that have deployed Outbound Spam Protection:
Mirapoint
“Our ISP customers constantly tell us that outbound spam is the biggest operational headache
they face. Each week they spend countless hours getting off blacklists and chasing down
compromised accounts or spammers on their networks. With Commtouch’s new solution, our
ISP customers will instantly identify and stop zombie and intentional spammers, so they can
keep their customers’ mail flowing, preventing them from being blacklisted and maintaining
their reputations.”
MailChannels
“My vision is to eliminate the global email spam problem by cutting out spam at its source,”
said Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels. “That vision is now within reach of the Internet
community, with this technology.”
Hostway
“Commtouch’s Outbound Spam Protection helped Hostway identify many compromised/
phished accounts as well as “trickle spam” that we otherwise couldn’t detect because it was
below our rate limits. Blocking outbound spam in real-time has prevented us from being
blacklisted by any major ISPs.”
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