Company

About Us

Back in the Summer of 2003, after the anti-spam company they had been working for was sold to UK-based Sophos, MailChannels founders Ken Simpson and Will Whittaker were having their weekly technology brainstorming session at a bustling cafe in Vancouver's West End. Frustrated by what they saw as a slow down in the advancement of anti-spam technology, Will and Ken founded MailChannels and began searching for a better way to fight spam.

Breakthrough Technology

Will and Ken's industry experience and software development expertise led them to create a combination of the two breakthrough technologies that make MailChannels Traffic Control so effective and efficient at fighting spam:

  • uniquely effective combination of positive sender reputation and email traffic shaping that permits zero hour elimination of botnet spam.
  • a real-time SMTP proxy that leverages a highly efficient event-driven software architecture, and a novel connection pooling approach that reduces downstream mail server load.

Continuous Innovation

MailChannels' mission is to provide the most accurate and cost effective anti-spam to organizations of all sizes. You might imagine that it's going to take some big innovations to deliver on that goal. We certainly do, which is why we've invested millions of dollars in research and development since our founding.

Achievements

Since our first commercial product release in 2006, we have earned praise from industry insiders and customers worldwide:

  • 2005: Key Patent Filings
  • 2006: Traffic Control 2.0 Release, First Fortune-500 Customer
  • 2007: Awarded MIT Spam Conference Best Paper Award
  • 2008: Awarded Red Herring Canada Top-50 Award

Management Team

Ken Simpson, CEO and Founder

Ken first experienced the excitement and magic of software when his father brought home one of the first IBM PCs in 1980, teaching him how to write simple programs in BASIC. Since then, he has combined his passion for software with entrepreneurism, founding or participating as an early-stage employee in four successful startups in a broad range of technical areas including Voice-over-IP, Wireless Internet, and of course anti-spam. Ken has a First Class Honors degree in Computer Engineering from Simon Fraser University and Santa Clara University and has two young children.

Stas Bekman, Director of Research

Stas Bekman has spent his professional career working on mission critical software and infrastructure for global technology companies including Intel and TicketMaster. Most recently, Stas was employed by TicketMaster to develop the web application infrastructure underlying TicketMaster's high availability e-commerce system. The platform Stas developed is used by Amazon.com, the BBC and many other of the world's largest and most successful web sites. In recognition of his contributions to the global IT community, Mr. Bekman was awarded the prestigious White Camel award at the 2005 O'Reilly OpenSource Conference in Portland, Oregon. He is a co-author of the O'Reilly book "Practical mod_perl" and is sought after worldwide as an educator and key note speaker. Stas has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Teknion.

Mike Smith, Director of Development

Mike Smith has managed productive development teams at numerous successful startups for over ten years. As one of the first developers hired at ActiveState, Mike was instrumental in designing and developing the highly successful PerlMX email security product, which attracted computer security pioneer Sophos to purchase the company. At ActiveState, Mike was also responsible for implementing key initiatives in e-commerce, licensing, and customer support.

Board of Directors

Eric Winsborrow, Director

Eric Winsborrow was the VP of Product Marketing for McAfee, where he conceived and executed the most successful launch in company history, "Total Protection Solutions," repositioning the company from anti-virus to security risk management. Eric also held executive positions at security companies, including Symantec, Sygate, and Cloudmark, and unified communications vendors Cisco, Lucent and Nortel. Eric Winsborrow currently works for Layer7 Technolgies where, as Chief Marketing Officer, he is responsible for their marketing, product management and business development.

Will Whittaker, Co-Founder and Director

Computer security expert and developer Will Whittaker, brings 10 years of computer security leadership to MailChannels. As an early employee at ActiveState, Will was one of the initial developers of PerlMX, which later became the industry leading PureMessage anti-spam solution. In 2003, ActiveState was acquired by Sophos, a leading computer security company. Mr. Whittaker is a published author and guest speaker at numerous international conferences including the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. For many years Will has also been a key organizer of the annual CanSecWest security conference, a world-renowned event for computer security professionals.

Technical Advisors

Dan Kaminsky, Director of Penetration Testing, IOActive

Best known for uncovering critical weaknesses in the Domain Name System and MD5 checksum algorithm, and for discovering a critical weakness in the Domain Name System in 2008, Dan Kaminsky is currently the Director of Penetration Testing for IOActive, a leading provider of network and computer security services for enterprises worldwide. Previously with Cisco and Avaya, Dan has been operating professionally in the security space since 1999. He is best known for his "Black Ops" series of talks at the well respected Black Hat Briefings conferences. He is also the only speaker who has attended and spoken at every single of Microsoft's exclusive "Blue Hat" internal training event. Dan focuses on design level fault analysis, particularly against massive-scale network applications. Dan regularly collects detailed data on the health of the worldwide Internet, and recently used this data to detect the worldwide proliferation of a major rootkit. Dan is one of the few individuals in the world to combine both technical expertise with executive level consulting skills and prowess.

Careers

MailChannels' people are our most valuable asset. Everything about MailChannels is a reflection of the interests and ethics of a wonderful team. We offer full extended health benefits, generous holidays, and a healthy work environment that promotes quality of life and personal development as aspects of your career.

Sound interesting? View open positions.