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Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.
It was only about three months ago when the startup, began by Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen, celebrated its 50 million message milestone, and only two months before that when the company reached 25 million. Mollom is still a young company, but these milestones are coming fast because so many websites are getting on the bandwagon with the aim of increasing the quality of their website interaction by blocking spam.
Even more impressive is that these statistics are for Mollom’s public servers only and don’t include message processing on private servers operated for large-volume clients, such as Netlog, an online social portal for European youth.
Mollom set up dedicated servers in Netlog’s data center to provide automated around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained content classifiers. Mollom’s servers analyze more than 50 messages per second for Netlog, adding up to an additional 4 million messages per day that are not counted in the latest milestone.
Large sites such as Netlog are turning increasingly to Mollom for its ability to filter spam in near real-time. Another site, popular citizen journalism hub NowPublic, had been receiving almost 25,000 spam posts per day before implementing Mollom’s service. After NowPublic installed Mollom, the number of legitimate comments by users jumped 180%, while spam comments fell to nearly zero.
Taking into account the traffic from the 10,000 websites that Mollom protects, Mollom currently processes up to 150 million messages a month, making it one of the largest website spam filtering services available today.
But Mollom is not content to rest on its past achievements. The company is currently changing the architecture of its back-end, which will make the software learn faster and make its actions easier to debug, analyze, and oversee.
Mollom offers its services in tiers, with products targeted at small blogs, mid-sized sites, and large enterprise-level Web properties. Mollom Free, designed for small blogs and sites with small posting volumes, is provided free of charge to the Web community, while Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium are commercial services designed for sites with higher volumes and reliability requirements. More information about its service plans is available on Mollom’s website.
