Nodens Solution Pte Ltd firmly believes that there is no satisfying solution when it comes to fighting spam, except the human brain. The company has therefore uniquely added a human-assisted factor to their spam filtering system.
Established in 2002, Nodens Solutions Pte Ltd's business goals have been continuously refined and reshaped over the past few years, driven by the experience, skills and knowledge of their team members. When the company first started out, it had in mind the idea to deal with all kinds of IT-related projects, hardware and software. However, the company is now more focused and their range of services nowadays can be broken down into two core businesses, namely data centre (colocation, hosting, dedicated server) and R&D/software development. The company is constantly pursuing a plethora of research and development activities to make the complex world of the Internet business easier to comprehend.
Nodens’ Spam Filtering System
Nodens Spam Filtering System (NSFS) is basically a 5-stage spam filtering system with a human assisted method at the final stage. The human factor in the whole equation is the main factor in deciding whether an email is spam or not. Their current NSFS version 4.2 has been provided to all their clients for the last 3 years and was recently commercialized as a paid service.
The solution scans an email for the first time during email handshaking before proceeding to the second stage which is the stage where it checks for black listing, whitelisting, DK, DomainKeys, SPF, viruses, frauds, phishing, etc. The third stage is the own developed regular expression, MX Server checks, SMTP Server Reputation. And although they are using black listing, whitelisting, DK, DomainKeys and SPF, they say that they neither distrust nor trust the email 100%. All of them are in a form of scores, which help the human factor to decide more accurately. The fourth stage is the human factor. Here, their trained staff look at 3 email snippets per second, at sender, recipients, subjects, headers, originated server, spam score, plus many other factors that decide whether an email is a spam or not. The final stage is QC (quality control) where the first time automated release is checked by their staff for spam that could have come through infected PCs.
Nodens system has been enhanced to the stage where only one person is enough to assist in handling 100 millions emails per month due to their own innovations and training, they say. And to give us an impression of what they are dealing with, the NSFS has seen:
- a legit email with blacklisted IP or URL
- a spam email with DK, Domainkeys and SPF
- a valid subject with spam body
- all kinds of phishing and impersonation
- 45K bounce backs of reversespam within 2 hours.
All emails that are released get fingerprinted that is, their “fingerprints” will be “remembered” by their system, ensuring a smoother email flow on the next communiqué. NSFS processed 3 million emails per month before it got commercialized. Showing how much the company has progressed since then, NSFS Gateway has processed 4 million emails so far since 13th Sep 2008, with all legit emails accurately let through.
Unique value propositions
Horn Wijaya, founder of Nodens Solutions Pte Ltd says: “We know that there isn’t a bulletproof solution to tackle spam. There is no software, no hardware, not even URIBL or IPBL that can guarantee it, so the best party to tell whether an email is spam is us.”
Indeed, the company seems to be quite unique in the world at this moment, because of the human factor, claiming that they can achieve 0% spam and almost 0% false positives and there is neither hardware nor software involved for clients. According to Nodens’ founder, their “clients can tackle spam without getting their hands dirty.” “For the past 4 years we have devised a method of using the human brain in the equation of fighting spam emails and our rules are updated every minute to ensure that we keep up with the evolution of spam. Apart from using a lot of logic in the system, the human brain is the final decision maker for undecided emails”, he adds.
Nodens’ team is trained to skim 3 emails per second and at the same time make the decision to release it. That’s the main secret why it is so efficient. And the human factor is the most prominent factor in terms of competition, too. Plus, NSFS is immune to any evolution of spam as the company is able to update their ‘spam rules’ on the fly. However, the whole 3-year-long R&D process did not come easily before NSFS was commercialized.
Last year for instance, the company tried to tap into Gmail’s spam filtering system as they seemed to be very good. “But when we diverted traffic to Gmail to be filtered, it failed terribly”, Horn Wijaya told us, “followed by many complaints of spam and many missing emails”. Therefore, their Gmail idea was shelved within just 3 days and Nodens went back to their own system. “We even used to have verification email method (like spamarrest), but that act alone is like spamming so it was also short lived”, he told us.
According to their founder, the company’s basic method (NSFS) still seems to be the best option so far as it guarantees them happy clients. Horn Wijaya says: “We take away the headaches of maintaining hardware, software, licenses, updates, etc. and leave the customers to concentrate on “making money”. The human factor is here still the most important factor in terms of making sure an email is delivered. The only setback is a bit of “delay”. In NSFS, every email is scrutinized as the company’s philosophy is: “Guilty until proven innocent” Elaborating on this, he says, “An email asking me to buy Viagra might be spam to someone, but between a doctor patient communiqués, Viagra could be mentioned a few times.”
To stay attractive in the future, NSFS will be enhanced to a stage where it will be able to handle a lot more emails and less human intervention, so-called AI (Artificial Intelligence). Emphasizing this, Nodens is pushing the benefits of their system which is cost savings and hassle free spam filtering into the limelight. Added benefits with the NSFS include:
- no hardware to purchase
- no software to purchase
- no license to manage
- no personnel to waste their time on spam
- a huge saving in bandwidth
- an increase in productivity
Horn Wijaya also states that the most important things for a spam filtering system are “False Positive” and “False Negative” rates.
Although a lot of software and hardware claim to be able to clean 99.9% of these, everything is yet to be tested – mentioning again their example of the Gmail case.
As the main problem with evaluation Nodens sees the installation and management as well as removal and testing of more software, and finding of a perfect solution for the hardware isn’t always easy as well. With NSFS, the company provides a test account for a user to try and evaluate, by auto-forwarding a copy of every incoming email of one of their email accounts to one of the test email accounts in their NSFS system and do a comparison of spam in his/her mailbox and the test email account after a week or so.
When asked who they think has the upper hand in the "Spam Wars" today, Horn Wijaya says: “Spam is like playing police and thief - spam filtering is always one step behind spammers, but here we are now. We have the upper hand and we are immune to the evolution of spam.
Evaluating the current world’s situation however, the spammers always have the upper hand. We have seen a lot of people change email addresses because of being too infested with spam, but NSFS takes on spam face-to-face day in, day out.”
Spam filtering is a niche market, and since there’s no viable solution in the current marketplace, the company foresees a lot of opportunities for themselves in the future, saying “We are here to help clients out, fighting on one front, while they concentrate on their core business front,” he stresses. “All in all, our clients have been benefiting from our system for so many years, so much so, some of them didn't even know what "spam" was”, Horn Wijaya quips. To potential new customers, he only has this to say, “Don’t wait, get a 3-day trial account to compare, seeing is believing!”
Currently Nodens Solution Pte Ltd has about 400 domains under its care spreading across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, France, UK, and has representative offices in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Their clients are businesses from all industries such as consulates/ embassies, law firm, investment firms, design houses, manufacturing, shipping, F&B, etc. The company wants to set up their own data centre in the future to provide more professional and proactive technical service and at the same time tries to save the environment by using green technology. So it looks like that we can expect much more to come.
By Daniela La Marca
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