Spam is invasive Internet advertising. Spam impinges on your existence in two ways: as unsolicited commercial email directly to your email Inbox and via massively cross-posted off-topic messages to USENET newsgroups.

Spam is bad because it consumes YOUR resources. The initial cost to the spammer sending out a spam are minimal. The costs on your end, however, are not.

In some ways spam is similar to junk snailmail in that it is flung out by an advertiser to a huge group of people in the hopes that someone out of that crowd will respond. The difference is that, with junk mail, the cost of the advertisement is borne by the advertiser. They pay to have the ad printed and mailed. The cost to you is fairly small, consisting primarily of the amount of your time consumed in inspecting the mail, determining that it's junk and throwing it away.

In the case of spam, however, the cost of the ad is arguably borne by agencies other than the organization that sent it. Someone may send a spam with only the relatively small initial investment of access to the Internet, a list of email addresses, and some method or software that sends the spam. The cost to you consists of the space taken up by the spam on the server that houses your email or newsfeed and, if you're paying for access, the amount of time and bandwidth taken up by downloading unwanted material. This is in addition to the amount of time you spend reading and determining this stuff is junk.

There is plenty of information on the web that outlines the true cost of spam to the Internet community. This has largely been a response to the typical spammer plea that they are just exercising their 1st amendment freedom of speech rights and that "if you don't like it, all you have to do is delete it." Anti-spammers counter that spam steals capacity from the Internet -- by grabbing resources from both users and access providers without their permission and without providing them with compensation for use.

The Interpole Spam Free E-Mail Solution

Various service providers and software companies have been developing anti-spam filter mechanisms over the past few years, to stop their entry into the mail system. Traditional anti-spam technical countermeasures are based upon maintaining a "blacklist" containing e-mail addresses, domains, and/or network subnets of known junk-mailers. Or worse, a "profile" of message headers and message body text that fits the software's idea of what a piece of SPAM looks like.

The traditional Blacklist-centric Strategy is
"Allow everything that is not explicitly denied"

The problem with this approach is that spammer's intrusion techniques are evolving as fast as your prevention techniques are, so the battle is never ending. Maintaining the blacklist is often just as time-consuming as pressing the "Delete" key on the easily recognized junk messages. If wasted time is your biggest complaint with junk e-mail, you can see why this traditional methodology is flawed.

The chance of accidental "false positives" is also significantly higher with this more complex approach. If you really want effective and reliable Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) control, you need something a more intelligent mechanism that doesn't rely on heuristics that spammers can work around.

How InterpoleMail differs?

The Interpole Solution consists of a reverse strategy to outsmart the spammers.

Our Allowedlist-centric Strategy is
"Deny everything that is not explicitly allowed''

With the Interpole Solution, unrestricted access to your mailbox can no longer be assumed, a premise, which spammers rely heavily upon.

The way the solution thwarts incoming junk-mail is simple yet extremely effective. The user maintains an "Allowed List" of trusted contacts, which are allowed directly into his/her mailbox. Messages from unknown senders are held back in a `Retained Folder' on the server, until they respond to a confirmation request sent by our software. Once they respond to the confirmation, their original message is deemed legitimate and is delivered to the user. The `Allowed List' is automatically updated to ensure that they won't have to confirm future messages to the same recipient. At any point, a user can view the contents of his `Retained Folder' and optionally choose to move it to the Inbox without sender's confirmation. Additionally, the `Retained Folder' can be set to delete messages over 10 days old to economise on your disk usage.

This methodology has the advantage of being very selective about what it allows in, while at the same time permitting legitimate, but previously unknown senders to reach you.

InterpoleMail's functionality is based upon the following assumptions about the current Internet infrastructure:
- You cannot keep your email address secret from spammers.
- Content-based filters can't distinguish spam from legitimate mail with sufficient accuracy.

To maintain economies of scale, bulk-mailing is generally:
- An impersonal process where the recipient is not distinguished
- A one-way communication channel (from spammer to victim)
- Spam will not cease until it becomes prohibitively expensive for spammers to operate.

How InterpoleMail Works?

A user of our service does not need to install any software on his local PC. When someone sends the user an email, the InterpoleMail server checks to see whether the user knows the sender, by referring to the `Allowed List'.

If the user knows the sender, it allows the message to pass through to the Inbox.

If not, the server puts the message in the `Pending Folder' and replies the sender requesting a reply confirmation that they are "real".

If they confirm they are "real" the message is returned to delivered to the user's Inbox to read & reply.

If they don't reply, the user can be 99% certain they were SPAMMING him. After a set period, the program will delete all the SPAMS without the user ever having to do anything.

The InterpoleMail Advantage
- End to Spam from Day One
- Minimal Change in System Setup
- Spam blocking at Server level, rather than the Desktop Level
- Maintenance Free
- Easy Access to `Pending E-mails
- Flexible User-based / Domain-based Subscription

Getting Started
Once a user subscribes to the InterpoleMail Service, we proceed towards moving the user to the Interpole Mail System (IMS). The Interpole technical team will evaluate your current mail setup and user accounts. They will setup an identical set of users on the IMS.

Once having configured the Users of your domain on the IMS, our team will accept a list of e-mail addresses to be treated as legitimate addresses corresponding to every user mailbox. This will prevent even the one-time mail confirmation request reaching your regular e-mail correspondents, and instead deliver their mail directly to the Inbox.

After the completion of the initial setup, the domain record will have to be modified in order to transfer the Mail Exchanger records to the IMS. After the DNS propagation, the IMS will begin processing the Incoming Mails of all the users in the domain. The users can setup their Mail Clients to download mails from the IMS, or optionally view the mails through the feature-rich Web Mail Client of IMS. The user at any time can login to the Web Mail to view any messages held back in the `Retained Folder' by IMS. A control panel will also be provided to the User to view his `Allowed Senders' list, and to add/delete names from the list.

Special Addresses
The Special Addresses feature provides you with custom made email addresses that fit a particular need, for instance you can have the need to provide a temporary email address for use in a E-commerce site or to talk with some one but only for a pre-defined time span.

For this you would use the Dated type of the special email addresses.

If the need is to allow some one to bypass the Anti-Spam protection allowing him/her to email you without the need for any type of confirmation then use the valid-sender option, such that only that user can write to you on the custom created email id.

Lastly if you wish to subscribe to a mailing list and do not want to use your normal email address in order to protect it from an email addresses harvester, then use a keyword base email address this will not expire until revoked.

Enable/Disable Feature

If you need to disable to Spam Protection mechanism for your email address temporarily, you can simply temporarily suspend protection till you enable it once again from the control panel. During this period, your email account will operate without any Anti-spam features.


Pending Queue

Any message received by the IPMail system, and is yet awaiting confirmation from the sender will be available for the user to examine. The user may further optionally transfer the mail to his Inbox and add the sender to the `Allowed List', even without receiving confirmation from the sender.

Additionally, the user may also have a pending report summary mailed out to him at a click from the Control Panel

Allowed List / Black List Editor

This option allows provides an editor to directly work on the Allowed List and Black Lists. Adventurous users may also apply advanced filtering rules by referring to the technical documentation

Frequently Asked Questions on Interpole Spam Free Mail Solution

How does IPMail know which messages are SPAM ?
Basically it is very simple. 99.999% of SPAM is sent by people you do not know. When you subscribe to IPMAIL, it will check your `Allowed List' to see which contacts you know, and remember who they are. Any messages from persons who you do not know or who have not been approved by you are replied to automatically and stored safely in a special folder. The reply asks the sender to confirm they are a "real" person. SPAMMERS don't reply, and automatic programs can't. So only replies from real people will release mail from the SAVE folder to your INBOX.

Can't spammers just setup an auto-responder to defeat IPMAIL?
In theory yes, but in practice this is not likely to happen. Most SPAM is not reply-able, so IPMAIL's confirmation requests are never delivered to them. They use non-valid return addresses as to not incur the cost of the tremendous number of bounces they generate. Using a valid return address to process all the bounces looking for confirmation messages to auto-reply to would defeat their economies of scale. It would also make them easy to block, track down and report, sue, etc.

Won't senders get perturbed about having to confirm their message?
A common misconception about systems based on whitelisting with challenges is that few of us are so irresistible that people will jump through extra hoops to talk to us. In actual practice, we've not found this to be the case at all. If someone took the time to craft and then send you a message, they will most likely take a few extra seconds to reply to a one-time confirmation request.
Once upon a time, people said the same thing about authenticating a mailing list subscription; something we now take for granted. IPMAIL's confirmation mechanism is really no different.
In any case, IPMAIL provides several different ways to monitor who sent you mail, who didn't reply to their confirmation request, etc (see next question).

How can I know when someone didn't confirm his or her message?
Although rare, there may be cases when someone can't (or won't) reply to your confirmation request, and you don't want to lose that message. IPMAIL provides several ways around this dilemma.
IPMAIL includes a "Pending Folder" browser that lets you manipulate your unconfirmed messages in different ways. Print summaries, view/delete/release/show/blacklist/whitelist, etc. You can even have a copy of each unconfirmed message forwarded to another address. Also, legitimate senders are faced with a IPMAIL confirmation request less than you might think. A well-constructed initial `Allowed List' will encompass the vast majority of your correspondents.

Can I ever lose important messages?
Any messages from persons who are not approved will be safely stored in the `Retained folder'. They are not removed unless:
You have selected AUTO remove after a set period. (Default 10 days).
You move them manually to the INBOX.

Which E-mail Clients are supported for IPMAIL?
IPMAIL is a system driver from the server-end. This means there is no special setup required on the PC that you use to access or download your mails. Hence any mail client can be used to work along with this system.

How do I add to the list of protected mail accounts?
The user can login to a web-based control panel, which will enable him to view the existing list of `Allowed Senders'; and permit him/her to add or delete addresses from the list.

Pricing

1. IPMail Service costing is per domain. IPMail Service package cannot be shared among multiple domains or aliases.
2. IPMail Service costing is specifically for Anti-Spam Solution only. Other resources such as mail hosting, DNS, mail space, POP Service, etc. are separate and have to be obtained from Interpole separately.
3. Interpole Solutions cannot be held responsible for any loss of mail due to the filtering techniques adopted by the software, or flaws if any in the software.
4. Service Fees are not refundable or transferable to another IPMail Domain Account.
5. Service charges includes free upgrades to IPMail software during the contract period.