Email is the lifeline of your business, so MailRoute’s focus is singular:
provide innovative, reliable protection from threats
Our Story
This is the story of how a problem turned into an industry.
Thomas Johnson was a working as an independent IT consultant in the 1990s, and he included some free mailboxes with hosted domains for clients. Pretty quickly, he realized that most of his time was being spent managing the free mailboxes.
Spam. Always more and more spam. Ersatz princes fleecing retirees out of their life savings.
Viruses. People clicking on links that shut down entire networks.
Tom wasn’t spending time growing his business or selling the really useful tools he offered. Instead, he was saving people from malicious onslaughts (and sometimes from themselves). He saw the time-suck growing each month and thought, “I need to solve this spam and virus problem, or I’m going to be managing free mailboxes for a living.”
Hosted email protection – and the first iteration of MailRoute – was born. It was 1997.
A cloud service, before anyone thought to call it “cloud”, was created. This initial company, Frontbridge, was sold to Microsoft in 2005 and core IP was retained by the founders. Microsoft rebranded what they'd bought as Forefront, and it became Microsoft’s first cloud offering.
First called Big Fish (then Frontbridge, and now MailRoute), Tom’s creation is a proprietary configuration of servers that runs its own IP to filter out unwanted mail and threats. Now the leader in email protection services, MailRoute remains founder-led.
MailRoute solves problems, saves money and reduces headaches for IT departments across the globe.
What We Believe
The biggest players in the filtering industry keep disappearing. Our first company,
Frontbridge, was bought by Microsoft and is now part of Office 365, virtually unimproved
since 2005. Google bought Postini and discontinued it. McAfee bought MX Logic and
shut it down. Symantec bought Message Labs and hasn’t done much with it.
Why? Because email filtering is labor- and resource-intensive. Public companies don't
want to offer it, when they have other moneymakers in their suite of services.
MailRoute does one thing and one thing only: Email Protection. We’re founder-led, self-financed,
and the most trusted team in this industry. We’re not for sale and will be here
for many years, as we have since 1997. We like our business and aren't required to sell
other pieces of a platform to justify our existence.
Further, switch costs are high for hosted services, so why choose yet another vendor
that may discontinue their service in a year or two? Choose MailRoute, the most trusted
name, in an industry that we created.
What We Do
- Enhanced Threat Mitigation: spam and virus filtering, ransomware, malware
- Quarantine, White/Blacklist, Store & Forward, DKIM, TLS encryption
- Mail Hold, Forwarding, and Continuity with 30/60/90 days of archived mail
- Administrative Control with Live 24/7 Support
- End-user Quarantine Notifications with one-click actions like whitelist/release
- API for easy account management
- White-glove migration
- Custom solutions on a project basis
- MailRoute uses artificial intelligence and community feedback, making our system smarter for every user
- Reputation management: You’ll never be blacklisted or send unwanted mail
Cool Statistics
- <1 second: Average processing time of a message by MailRoute
- >99% spam-capture rate
- 1:1,000,000 false-positives
- 99.999% uptime guaranteed
- 12 minutes: Average response time for Level 1 Support
- 0 reported WannaCry attacks
- 0 reported Crypto or Heartbleed infections
- 6 methods for easy migration/population, from CSV import to LDAP/AD sync
- $42,000: Cost to an SME for 1 hour of downtime, per Gartner research
Why You Need MailRoute
Industry Leader
• More than 20 years as a SaaS, offering hosted email filtering
• 99.999% uptime guaranteed on MailRoute’s proprietary network of servers
• 3x redundancy: No single point of failure
• Platform agnostic – MailRoute works with Office 365 and all hosts or servers
• Ongoing development of new features: MailRoute never becomes obsolete
Cost Saving & Benefits
• 90+% reduction in traffic on your server by using MailRoute
• Reduce bandwidth, CPU and memory resource needs
• 15 days of storage if your server goes down, or 30/60/90 days with Continuity service
• API provides unique functionality for account management
• 100% cost-free U.S.-based Customer Support
• Meets compliance standards for ITAR & HIPAA
• GDPR compliant
Easy Implementation
• 60 seconds to setup and activate a MailRoute account
• Free 30-day trial
• No hardware or software to install
• Risk-free implementation
• Set it & forget it. No need for updates, costly upgrades or maintenance.
Nice Things People Say About Us
I managed our email presence for my previous employer including filtering and
reputation-management, all in-house. Our implementation was PAIN FREE. MailRoute
and their team had us up and running, and cut over in less than one workday.
On a scale of 1 to 5, for effectiveness in blocking unwanted content, this is a 5+. With the
unique filtering algorithms, there is little unwanted mail that comes in.
We have on a few occasions needed to contact support and they have been, without
exception, an invaluable asset to this organization. They truly do not give up, nor will
they go home if a problem is not fixed. They have gone above and beyond every time I
have ever asked them to assist.
Jim Barry, Senior Manager, Information Technology at ConforMIS, Inc.
(formerly of Lowell Cooperative Bank)
We use MailRoute exclusively for all of our clients’ inbound and outbound mail filtering
needs. Although we protect several different types of mail servers, the overwhelming
majority of our clients use Microsoft Exchange in every flavor from 2003 to 2010. Our
clients, and in turn ourselves as managed service providers demand simplicity and
reliability which MailRoute provides every time.
Migrating our existing clients over to MailRoute as well as setting up new clients is a
breeze. We simply point our customers’ MX records over to MailRoute and then
configure our firewalls and Exchange servers to only accept mail from MailRoute
servers. We use MailRoute outbound services for all clients and configure Exchange to
route all mail out to MR servers so that we don't have to worry about getting blacklisted.
I no longer have clients complain about the amount of spam they receive; they simply
don't get any with MailRoute. As with any anti-spam system, there is occasionally a false
positive or two. This is no big deal since the provided interface allows for easy release
and whitelist of any legitimate email. [Also accomplished from within the Quarantine
Notifications.]
Overall we are extremely happy with technical services provided and the excellent (and
extremely personal) support that we receive. Any time we have had an issue (rarely do)
we always get a quick response and expert advice.
Alan I. Bildzukewicz, Sr., Junopi Technical, Owner
The People
CEO THOMAS A. JOHNSON
Thomas A. Johnson is a leading authority on email protection, and the creator of an early
search engine and Cloud services. He is the chairman of the board and CEO of
MailRoute, Inc., headquartered in Manhattan Beach, California. Johnson is the founder
of FrontBridge, acquired by Microsoft as the foundation of their Cloud-based MS
Exchange Hosted Services.
In 1984, Johnson bought the first-generation Mac and started programming it. (He still
has his receipt for the 128K Macintosh.) This interest in computer programming led to
Johnson spending five years in the UCLA Computer Science Department working for
Leonard Kleinrock, the father of the Internet, networking supercomputers and
workstations.
In 1993, Johnson left UCLA to re-invent the American Medical Association’s online
community, which became US Health Link. Johnson suggested that they use the
Internet, instead of a private network, and it was here that he created one of the first
Internet search engines as well as an early Cloud application.
“The search engine was born from a program I created that basically hopped around the
Internet grabbing information and dumping all of it into a big Oracle database so that you
could do searches,” Johnson explains. “Then I wrote a piece of multithreaded code that
could run on a few different machines that all talked to each other; it ran like one big
application, but running on several servers,” says Johnson of his early Cloud
configuration.
Johnson saw a place for Cloud services before they were called Cloud. As a private
consultant, in 1997, Johnson realized that when he was hosting websites, which
included free mailboxes, “I spent more time managing the mailbox aspect of the
business than I did the webhosting.” Recognizing a place in the market, Johnson created
a high-quality third-party Cloud email filtering service. Launched as Big Fish, this
company ultimately became FrontBridge and was acquired by Microsoft in 2005.
MailRoute was founded by Johnson to set new standards in email protection services.
He and his technology team have developed MailRoute’s multi-layered solution to be
highly efficient, reliable, and cost-effective. MailRoute offers email protection services to
corporate, municipal, and education customers; it filters inbound and outbound
messages through its proprietary network of servers. The company is privately funded.
CFO MARK S. TENNENBAUM
Mark S. Tennenbaum is a member of the board of directors of MailRoute, Inc. and the
company’s CFO. He is also a co-founder of FrontBridge (sold to Microsoft in 2005), the
former CFO of SoftAware Networks (sold to Digital Island in 2000), and a strategic
advisor to other young technology companies.
Prior to his Internet experience, Tennenbaum’s professional focus was primarily on
finance and corporate development. In these capacities he helped to grow such diverse
companies as Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Kaiser Group Holdings, Landmark
Theatres and Craig Corporation.
Tennenbaum holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA as well as a BA in
Psychology from the Pitzer College, the Claremont Colleges.
VP SALES & MARKETING RACHEL A. PLECAS
Rachel A. Plecas is the VP of Sales & Marketing at MailRoute, Inc., and was the Director
of Communications at FrontBridge (sold to Microsoft in 2005), where she worked with
MailRoute CEO Tom Johnson and CFO Mark Tennenbaum.
Plecas has 15 years of overseas experience, based in Hong Kong, where she was
Editor-in-Chief of Tatler Asia, a group of luxury lifestyle publications in nine countries.
She also founded What’s Next, a business development company aimed at introducing
Western retail brands into the China market. Plecas consults for Asian Strategies,
executing Asia-specific market research for Barclays, BBC, Rolex, HP, IBM, Motorola
and other multi-nationals.
Plecas holds a BA in Literature from Oakland University as well as certification in plantbased
nutrition from Cornell University.
Call 888.485.7726 or email sales@mailroute.net
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