Guinevere by Bell

I first created Guinevere in 1998, when working for a small environmental consulting firm of around 65 employees. We had just switched from cc:Mail to GroupWise, and needed anti-virus protection. Seeing no available solutions, I wrote the first alpha version of Guinevere in a week after reading tantalizing hints about the third party directory in the GWIA. (It is a sad comment on my social life that I read Novell Knowledgebase articles for entertainment.) I continued to develop it over the next few months, and then decided to make it commercially available. Barry Merchant, then a GroupWise Sysop assisted with providing a beta customer, Bevan Ashford.

At the time of release, there were no native solutions for GroupWise, and the few SMTP proxy solutions out there were expensive and missing many important features. For example, the fingerprinting (by content instead of file extensions) was to my knowledge the first available in a commercial AV product, and together with traditional file extension blocking and double extension blocking helped block the vast majority of virus outbreaks.

Within a month of releasing Guinevere, the I Love You virus was released into the wild. Folks may forget this one, but it was one of the first wide spread viruses, and our switchboard jammed with folks testing Guinevere (and happily in many cases purchasing it). It was an exciting and challenging time. Each week for the next 8 weeks. I released a new patched version of Guinevere. There were many, many challenges in adapting it to peoples’ requirements and of course all the malformed email out there that didn't quite fit. It was quite exciting and quite stressful, but the interactions with the customers were almost uniformly wonderful, and one of the great joys of developing this software was being able to communicate and interact with the GroupWise community so intimately. (Ok, some of them might not have wanted to have to talk to ME for a few hours!)

In 2002, I released Guinevere 2. This was largely a rewrite of Guinevere, and included GroupWise's first integrated anti-spam solution, adapted from the open source SpamAssassin project.  This anti-spam engine was the first comprehensive anti-spam technology adapted into a major commercial solution that I am aware of - previous vendors merely enabled basic regex and content blocking, but did not adopt the heuristic scoring and Bayesian approach that rapidly became widespread.  Guinevere was now a comprehensive anti-spam, anti-virus, and content filtering solution. Together with partners that created GuinFilter and Guinterface, I was and am very proud of this product. Loyal customers adopted this product in rapid fashion, and the overwhelmingly positive feedback was both humbling and gratifying. This was followed by Guinevere 3 in 2005, which added many cool features, like a full reporting engine, and an enhanced SpamAssassin integration.

Guinevere in itself was directly responsible for the creation of GWAVA the product and hence GWAVA the company. I had been contacted by Bruce Armstrong, then the GroupWise product manager, who wanted an NLM version of Guinevere. Together with my partner Josh Gibbs -- whose tremendous knowledge and skill has shaped, designed, and implemented GWAVA to this day (and who was solely responsible for the back-end core code in GWAVA versions 1-3) -- we created MTASieve, which later morphed into GWAVA. And the rest, as they say in the cliche, is history...

In the last few years, I've been more occupied with GWAVA and then Retain and some of the limitations of Guinevere's architecture have become evident. The new GWAVA SMTP Proxy feature, and the forthcoming Windows version of GWAVA, along with the amazingly powerful features that Josh and his team have come up with in the last 5 years, have made it the premier e-mail security product on GroupWise. And, it's finally time to retire the old girl, and let Guinevere go to that place in the sky where it can frolic with other software that has been outpaced by technological advances.

But just as you never forget your first love, I will never forget Guinevere. The challenges and opportunities it brought have shaped my life, and given me a chance to do stuff I never imagined. And the wonderful customers and people I've known over the years are the best part of it.

I would like to take the time to thank each and every one of you that used Guinevere over the years.  Knowing all of you, working for all of you, spending time to understand your needs (and fix your bugs!), and providing you with a quality product is and was an amazing experience.  It has been a privilege that few people have the opportunity to enjoy. I hope that we as a company will continue to earn your loyalty in the years to come, and that you will consider GWAVA as an option for your mail security needs (and beyond).

My sincere appreciation and love go to you all,

Mike