Mailspect taming unstructured Email data

Paul Sterne, CMO of Mailspect, collared me yesterday and brought me up to speed on what he's doing now.  Paul and I worked together at Open-Xchange.  His company is doing something that is new to me. It might be something new to you as well.

Here's what Mailspect has to say about MPP Web Services

Mailspect, formerly Message Partners, is the inventor of Email Stream Management. Email and its embedded data is the most information data stream in any organization.  Email continues to be the most important business communications tool.  Radicati Group Inc. estimates that there are 2.5 billion email accounts currently in use — 42 for every 100 people on the planet.

ESM is the technology that protects the email stream from external threats, processes the email stream based on business logic, integrates the data in the email stream with core business systems and stores the email stream for regulatory compliance and legal discovery.  No other software products offers the breadth and flexibility of ESM.  Our customers keep discovering new and innovative ways to use it.

Mailspect Inc. has in roots in the anti spam business.  We know how to take an email apart  and understand its components:  sender, receiver, domain, IP address, full-text content, and attachments.  After dissecting an email, we process it based on customer-defined business rules:  block, release, quarantine, route, prioritze, aggregate, archive, and integrate.  Our platform, MPP or the Message Processing Platform, integrates Open Source and commercial best-of-breed technologies in one platform.

We have been providing email management solutions since 2001.  Our software scans billions of emails per day at service providers, businesses, enterprises, governments, schools, and not-for-profits.  MPP includes over 150 features and solves a broad array of mission-critical issues.

Snapshot analysis

An amazing amount of corporate data and company-to-company communication can now be found in the organization's Email system. Routing that traffic through a programmable interface allowing it to be scanned and then routed to the right place for further processing could be a great help. SPAM could be routed to the bit bucket. Important orders could be routed to a sales system. Without spending much time on it, I could come up with eight or ten other uses.

While some systems offer the ability to deal with parts of the Email stream, a general-purpose, programmable tool is something new to me.

I guess that I'll have to ask my colleague, China Martens, what she thinks about them.