First off, let me thank everyone who responded to my offshore outsourcing article a couple of weeks ago; I have many follow-on articles planned, the first of which should appear next week.

In the meantime, I would like to follow-up on last month's anti-spam article in which I shared with you my experiences with service-based anti-spam companies. After my article hit the wires, I found out about a new ASP in the space, MyFailSafe.com, which has an innovative approach to the spam problem while also solving issues with the availability and security of e-mail services.

MyFailSafe is the "instantiation" of some truly awesome technology developed by the folks at ZeroNines. The idea behind the ZeroNines technology is, as the name implies, "zero nines - 100% availability."

Its patented technology multicasts application network traffic to multiple geographically dispersed locations, and if one server fails, the ZeroNines appliance dynamically and instantaneously switches the network connection to another running server, with no interruption in the data stream. I've seen it work, and it's like magic - users can unplug a connection to a production server in one location, and another server in an alternate location seamlessly picks up where the other left off - and the applications continue running as if nothing happened. When the connection is reestablished, the first server is automatically brought up-to-date and takes its share of the load.

While ZeroNines has enjoyed some traction in the marketplace, some people have had a hard time appreciating the full potential of the technology. The ZeroNines development team decided that creating a commercial product around its technology would be the best way to showcase it - and MyFailSafe was born.

MyFailSafe prevents spam by using challenge/response technology in which users create a "white list" of allowed senders by uploading an address book or through manual data entry. E-mail from these senders is transparently passed to the MyFailSafe inbox. If a non-white listed person sends an e-mail to the MyFailSafe address, they are sent a "challenge" e-mail that asks them to prove that they are a human (and hence not a spam engine). Users can allow these senders to be automatically added to their white list, or they can opt for manual approval. I use challenge/response technology myself for my personal e-mail, and I can testify that it is very effective (over 98% in my testing).