Roaring Penguin Software

Roaring Penguin Software, Inc. is a small business which sells computer software, particularly in the area of antispam. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, the company develops both free and commercial software primarily for the purpose of e-mail filtering.^[1]

History

Roaring Penguin was launched in 1999 by Dianne Skoll,^[2] former R&D project leader at Chipworks, Inc. Roaring Penguin initially started as a consultancy. The following year, Skoll wrote the MIMEDefang e-mail filter for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada to limit e-mail and virus spam on the college network.

Skoll donated MIMEDefang to the open-source community under a GNU General Public License.^[1] Roaring Penguin then began to develop a user-friendly commercial anti-spam product called CanIt, which has now become their flagship product. The company now has more than 800 customers using CanIt, many of which are large service providers who have immense spam filtering problems.^[3] According to Bill White, VP of Marketing & Sales for Roaring Penguin, MIMEDefang has been the biggest source of business leads for the company.^[1] He believes that when the code was released as GPL it "inadvertently created credibility and marketing for the new company."^[1] Roaring Penguin continues to develop commercial anti-spam software such as CanIt, in addition to working on the open-sourced MIMEDefang project.

Roaring Penguin recently announced a partnership with Level Platforms, a provider of remote monitoring and management software. This partnership solves for resellers the challenge of monitoring the anti-spam portion of their customers' e-mail communications infrastructure.^[4]

The latest major MIMEDefang release from Roaring Penguin Software is MIMEDefang 2.78 (released on 23 April 2015.)

Notes