AbusePipe

Abuse Email Analysis Solution for ISPs

  Screen shots | Setup instructions

AbusePipe identifies who is sending spam based on the information in emailed complaints.

AbusePipe analyses abuse complaint emails (typically sent by irate users to abuse@yourISP.com) and determines which of your customers is sending spam (also known as unsolicited commercial email or UCE). It automatically generates reports showing which customers have violated your acceptable use policy, and you can very quickly take action to shut them down.

AbusePipe requires NO technical knowledge to operate it. It takes the place of the technical staff that you currently have investigating spam complaints. Once installed, you can use less technical front-of-house staff to contact customers.

AbusePipe is the ONLY system that deals with abuse COMPLAINTS, and helps ISPs in their fight against spam from within their own networks.

Here's your new business process:

• Automatically receive abuse complaint emails
• Automatically identify which customer sent the spam
• Contact customer: Assess, inform or shut them down.

Advantages

1. Far quicker response time to abuse complaint emails (From 3 weeks down to 1 day or 1 hour depending on reporting period chosen)
2. Far less chance of your ISP being blacklisted/blocked by other ISPs for failure to act against spammers
3. No technical staff required to investigate abuse. Technical staff can return to their normal job functions rather than spending the majority of it reacting to email abuse
4. Spammers will find your ISP less of a 'soft target', and hence they will target other ISPs
5. Move abuse follow-up to a front-of-house activity, with a simple report forwarded to call centre staff for customer follow-up on a daily basis
6. Can also be used to detect customers who are the victims of virus infections that are sending out massive volumes of email

Reporting

AbusePipe can send data to Excel spreadsheets, so you can use PivotTable facilities, or you can send data to MS Access and SQL Server databases (or any other OLE DB/ODBC database). Once the data is in a database you can apply more sophisticated reporting. We include standard daily, weekly and monthly Top 20 Offender Reports, and individual IP addresses or IP address ranges reports. You can tailor and extend these reports as you see fit.

AbusePipe can be configured to report on spamvertised websites, where a website on your network is referenced in the spam.

AbusePipe can be configured to ignore non-routable addresses, internal routers, fire walls and any other internal hardware connected to you network, to prevent false readings. IP addresses can be ignored by range or individually. Note - the address of the complaint email itself is automatically ignored.

Our data warehouse style data model also allows you to apply reporting tools such as Brio and Business Objects to the captured data.

Email Volumes

Our system is capable of easily handling 6,500 emails every 30 minutes (10 million per month), with daily, weekly and monthly reports turned around in seconds with our unique data warehouse.

Archiving and Data Retention

Our data retention strategy can be set to maintain 6 month's data or more, as required. This is useful for analyzing repeat offenders, and also to maintain data to fulfill legal obligations.

Once processed, abuse complaint emails can be moved to another folder for archive purposes, deleted, marked as read, or tagged with special text in the subject line.

Auto Email-Replies

AbusePipe can be configured to automatically reply to people reporting abuse.

CRM Integration

AbusePipe can be customized to insert contact records in your CRM database, so follow-up can be handled as a daily call centre activity. Records can also be inserted when various conditions are met e.g. email flooding etc.

Note: AbusePipe is not designed as a replacement for the CRM system you already have.

Law Enforcement

AbusePipe can assist in meeting legal obligations such as reporting on the customers connected to a given IP address at a given date and time. Some of our customers receive 1 or more grand jury subpoena a day - and AbusePipe helps to cut down the time that it takes to fulfill these obligations.

Delivery Options

We can run AbusePipe for you as an outsourced Managed Service. All you have to do is send us a copy of the abuse complaint emails you receive, and we will send you back daily, weekly and monthly reports, to one or more email addresses. We can also provide customized reports to suit your requirements, and/or provide access to our data warehouse for reporting tools such as Brio and Business Objects.

To maintain your corporate security, we can provide secure physical locations and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for transmission of sensitive email data to our analysis server.

You can also purchase a less integrated version of AbusePipe to run manually within your operations group. This option requires that your technical staff be trained in the installation, configuration and use of AbusePipe. AbusePipe is a client-based application that parses

Our Solutions

AbusePipe builds on the robust text and data mining solutions that we've been building since 1998.

AbusePipe runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 Server, Vista and Vista 64. It uses Microsoft Outlook 2000 or higher and can take abuse complaint emails from any folder that you specify. It relies on a database - be it MS Access, SQL Server or any other ODBC/OLE DB database.

For More Information and a Free Email Analysis

We're happy to provide you with an evaluation of our system.

We need you to email us a representative sample (10-20) of abuse complaint emails - just copy and paste abuse complaint emails into a new email (as attachments). Please contact us for the address to send these to.

We can provide daily, weekly, monthly and yearly IP reports for identifying spammers.

Please let us know if there are any other reports you'd like to see.

What Actions Might an ISP Take?

Depending on the customer's apparent level of technical competence and prior history, ISP actions might include:

• Explaining to them what evidence has been recorded
• Selling them a hardware or software firewall to help protect their system from hackers (closing open ports etc)
• Selling them virus scanning software to prevent future virus infection
• Immediately disconnecting technical users.

"Our ISP primarily uses Dialup. I don't have SPAM abuse complaint problems"

In our experience, we have found that the far larger number of customers on dialup vs. broadband generates an equivalent volume of abuse complaints. The emails may be sent out much more slowly, but they are still sent out, and you must still take action to avoid being blacklisted/blocked. With Dialup connections you must actually react faster to abuse complaints because the customer's IP address can change the moment they hang-up. While still not a problem for our system, it does make it slightly harder to identify the customer.

Static IPs

If you have a satellite component or other static IP based network, AbusePipe will work even better because there is no need to match IPs with Cisco NetFlow logs or other traffic logs. AbusePipe is independent of network infrastructure, so it remains running even if you change your underlying infrastructure.

Awards

Screen shots | Setup instructions