Cloudmark

Cloudmark, Inc is a privately held company, San Francisco-based, providing protection against spam, viruses, phishing and spear phishing, threats that affect email and mobile messaging.

The company protects more than one billion subscribers for the world's largest carrier networks and ISPs worldwide, safeguarding 12 percent of email accounts and 20 percent of mobile accounts around the globe.

In addition to its San Francisco headquarters, it has offices in London, Paris and Tokyo and an international salesforce spanning additional countries.

On December 14, 2016, Cloudmark announced shutdown of DesktopOne after December 1, 2017.

Cloudmark was founded in September 2001 by Vipul Ved Prakash and Jordan Ritter. The company was initially built on Prakash's open source anti-spam solution Vipul's Razor.

Today Cloudmark's clients include more than 100 Tier 1 carriers and ISPs around the globe, including Comcast, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Verizon, Sprint, Cox and Time Warner in the U.S. International accounts include O2, EE Limited and Vodafone in the UK, Swisscom. Idea, RIL, Tata, and Aircel in India, Zain Nigeria in Africa, VimpelCom in Russia. Zain Saudi Arabia and South American carriers VIVO, TIM, OI and Telecom Personal. Cloudmark also provides messaging security solutions for 70,000 enterprises.

Cloudmark claims to be "a comprehensive global sender monitoring and analysis system that delivers timely and accurate reputation on good, bad, and suspect senders." Cloudmark provides an extensive overview of the approach it uses to make various determinations of "reputation" quality. However, Cloudmark does not disclose which specific criteria was applied in its determination of "reputation" quality related to a discrete email sender. Nor does Cloudmark make available a discrete list of email senders which are subject to an adverse reputation determination. Many other providers of reputation assessments do have this facility. As a result, the administrators of a Cloudmark blocked email server have no opportunity to determine whether or not Cloudmark may have unjustly assigned a less than acceptable reputation to the email server.

In process, once an adverse determination is assigned to a sending email server by Cloudmark, the entire stream of email sent from it to a server, which applies Cloudmark's reputation assessment to its email acceptance rules, results in all such email being persistently blocked from delivery. A generic message is delivered back to the sending server each time that a transmission to a Cloudmark designated recipient was refused. The specific reason for the refused delivery is not disclosed. The intended recipient is not notified that all email from a certain mail server is being persistently blocked. Such may indeed have an adverse impact on time sensitive legitimate email messages which are being blocked without notice to the intended recipient.

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