What is Karma?
Karma is a Windows service that acts as an upstream SMTP bridgehead. This means that it is software that sits between the Internet and your mail server, filtering and processing the messages. As it finds messages that meet the specific criteria, it will reject it and promptly inform the user's ISP that one of its clients is abusing their system. The product is not only designed to prevent SPAM from reaching your inbox, but also to prevent the spammer from ever sending SPAM to anyone else.
How does Karma work?
As an inbound SMTP (mail) connection is being made, Karma compares the inbound IP Address of the sending system and compares it to an extremely broad database of IP Addresses. The processing actions that are taken then depend on both how the address is classified and how the administrator has chosen to handle messages of each type. The product does not use heuristics of any kind and it does not use the 'from' address as a primary method of catching SPAM.
What are the system requirements?
Karma requires a server, either Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 on which to run. If you are running Microsoft Exchange Server or another mail program on a Windows Server platform, the service can co-exist with your existing mail server. The product also requires Microsoft SQL Server, version 2000. If you do not have a SQL server, you can use the MSDE engine freely available from Microsoft. Karma also requires Microsoft's IIS to be running on one machine that has Microsoft's .NET API redistributables installed on it.
How much does Karma cost?
Karma is completely free. We do not currently have any model that provides for any form of payment for either the software or its support. We also do not ever anticipate the product being a truly commercial application, as we feel this violates the spirit in which the product was created. However, if you do have a desire to assist our organization or support our developers, please feel free to look around our site at the services we provide and keep us in mind for any projects that you may have coming up.
Is Karma an Open Source product?
No. Although we are giving the product away to anyone who wishes to use it, the code and data are copyrighted and we are currently not allowing any outside developers to provide work on the product. As a company and as individuals, we all feel that there is a great space in the software industry for Open Source projects, but do not feel that this is one of those occasions. Total Immersion Software has made a business out of providing products that operate exactly as advertised and are guaranteed to be bug-free. We have historically found that model to be incompatible with the embedding of code from other developers without providing a great deal of additional resources to manage and verify the code submissions.