Started as an interal project

MailMum was born out of a need to face problems with unwanted emails called spam or junk. As filters like Spamassassin were good, but spammers are human, their job is to figure out how to bypass them. They will try and will find ways to reach your inbox.

But even before we were using filters, blacklists were the most common defense against unwanted emails. Like most starting email admins, we used public blacklists first and were very happy, that a lot of junk arriving these days as waves from single senders could be blocked, reducing the amount of junk and traffic to our servers.

But as soon as blacklists started to list IPs essential for our customers and us, we faced the problems as we think every admin met, who used or still using public blacklists.

But as the internet started to grow and more and more servers and services with virtual machines and later called cloud computing, grew even faster, more and more blacklists began to miss a lot of spam hitting our systems. That’s why we’ve started and tried to understand and build our first blacklisting and whitelisting solution, to deliver better quality for our customers.

By whitelisting essential services, we could bypass blacklisting for our customers' important IPs and email services on public blacklists.