Whose Side Is IronPort On?

Email

from the playing-both-sides-against-each-other dept

Last week we reported that popular anti-spam filtering company SpamCop was getting bought by IronPort. Later in the day, a friend of mine instant messaged me, saying, “Last I heard, IronPort makes servers specifically for sending spam.” I’ll admit I didn’t know that much about IronPort, but now the NY Times is also pointing out that IronPort is known for selling the best systems for bulk commercial emailing, though, they swear the machines are only being used for legitimate marketing. Still, there’s plenty to be concerned about – considering that some of IronPort’s customers are currently on SpamCop’s block list. While they insist that they’re going to leave SpamCop entirely separate, it certainly could get tricky over time. The article also mentions, by the way, that IronPort really bought SpamCop over the summer – and only admitted it when reporters started looking into the story. That’s not a good sign – since SpamCop has had a lot of problems recently, which I’d hoped would be solved by having a little financial backing. Instead, it appears that many of the problems occurred after they already had that backing.