MailChannels is a Canadian technology company that is specialized in email security for businesses and
internet service providers
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...
(ISPs). Founded in 2004 by Ken Simpson and headquartered in
Vancouver, British Columbia
Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...
, the company operates in the areas of
email security
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
and infrastructure market. The business provides a variety of products and services designed to safeguard email systems against spam, phishing, and other harmful content. Simultaneously, they guarantee the dependable delivery of legitimate messages. Additionally, they offer a mail relay API for numerous websites.
Company history
The company was founded in 2004 by former engineers of
ActiveState
ActiveState Software Inc is a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It develops, sells, and supports cross-platform development tools for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, as well as ...
(acquired by
Sophos
Sophos Group plc is a British based security software and hardware company. Sophos develops products for communication endpoint, encryption, network security, email security, mobile security and unified threat management. Sophos is primarily ...
), who created one of the first commercial spam filters.
The company's first product was an SMTP proxy that provides
tar-pitting and transparent
SMTP proxy
SMTP proxies are specialized mail transfer agents (MTAs) that, similar to other types of proxy servers, pass SMTP sessions through to other MTAs without using the store-and-forward approach of a typical MTA. When an SMTP proxy receives a connectio ...
functionality for inbound
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
filtering.
In 2007, MailChannels joined M³AAWG and closed a
series A round
A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...
led by early
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
employees.
In 2010, the company launched an outbound
email filtering
Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. The term can apply to the intervention of human intelligence, but most often refers to the automatic processing of messages at an SMTP server, possibly appl ...
software that claims to be capable of filtering up to 30 million messages per hour, transparently in the network. Outbound email filtering involves scanning email traffic as it exits the network, identifying compromised accounts, and reducing the risk of having IP addresses blocked by receiving networks.
In 2013, the company launched a cloud-based outbound email filtering service.
In 2018, the company launched a cloud-based inbound email filtering service.
In 2022, the company decided to stop supporting
Plesk
Plesk is a commercial web hosting and server data center automation software developed for Linux and Windows-based retail hosting service providers.
It was developed by Plesk International GmbH, with headquarters in Toronto, Canada and Schaf ...
for outbound email filtering.
Email spoofing exploit
In August 2023, A presentation was given at
DEF CON 31 by security researcher Marcello Salvati that demonstrated how he was able to impersonate over 2 million domains registered to Mailchannel by taking advantage of their lack of authentication of domain ownership. Salvati discovered that anyone with access to a free
Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in San ...
account could send email using any domain registered with MailChannels. This was made possible due to MailChannels trusting all traffic from Cloudflare. The only security MailChannels had to prevent abuse of their system from Cloudflare users was a spam filter.
CEO Ken Simpson said in an interview on
Axios Axios commonly refers to:
* Axios (river), a river that runs through Greece and North Macedonia
* ''Axios'' (website), an American news and information website
Axios may also refer to:
Brands and enterprises
* Axios, a brand of suspension produ ...
website, "MailChannels sends email for 30 million different domains that are hosted behind over 600 web hosting provider networks. We cannot force every domain owner to verify the ownership of their domain because domain owners do not even authenticate domain ownership with their own hosting provider".
Simpson and Salvati had spoken with each other months before the research was published, and in response to this serious flaw in security, MailChannels and Cloudflare implemented a new feature called "Domain Lockdown" that uses domain authentication by tying registered domain names to MailChannel accounts and sender ID to try and prevent any future domain impersonation.
See also
*
E-mail spam
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).
The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoida ...
*
Mail transport agent
Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...
*
Outbound spam protection
*
Tarpit (networking)
A tarpit is a service on a computer system (usually a server) that purposely delays incoming connections. The technique was developed as a defense against a computer worm, and the idea is that network abuses such as spamming or broad scanning ar ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:MailChannels
Anti-spam
Spam filtering
Technology companies established in 2004
Canadian companies established in 2004
2004 establishments in British Columbia