Cloud-based service promises 99% spam-free inbox, or your money back

The “Spear phishing” attack responsible for the RSA network breach network in March demonstrated that e-mail remains the weakest point in enterprise security. Even when spam filtering systems that block a majority of incoming malicious and just plain annoying e-mails, the sheer volume of spam that still gets through presents a huge potential route for attackers to exploit. Now, one mail filtering company is offering a guarantee that it will block at least 99 percent of incoming spam—except if you happen to be Google, Apple, Facebook, or AOL.

That’s the sales pitch of Abaca Technology Corp., the company that built the anti-spam technology protecting Yahoo's 260 million inboxes. For each day the accuracy rate of the company’s e-mail filtering service, called Abaca Cloud Mail Filter, falls below 99 percent, the company will give customers a credit that they can either apply to renewing their license or toward a refund. Abaca Cloud Mail Filter is available as a gateway appliance, virtual server, or pure cloud service.

Abaca general manager John Jefferies said in an interview with Ars Technica that the company “spent the last few years at Yahoo enhancing our algorithm for spam filtering.” After starting out in Europe, Taiwan, and Korea—where Jefferies said “language issues made it difficult for Yahoo to catch spam”—the Abaca filtering system was rolled out to Yahoo’s US customers 14 months ago. “The final area we rolled the service out to was India,” he said, where “the spam is largely bad links without much content.”