Case Study: Heluna achieves scalable, high-throughput anti-spam processing with Akka (Typesafe Platform)

Typesafe boosts Heluna Anti-Spam Service

Heluna is a cloud-based SaaS anti-spam service that processes millions of e‑mail messages daily and learns from every message. Rapid growth exposed the limits of its legacy stack—an off‑the‑shelf MTA (Sendmail), Perl/C components and incohesive third‑party products—which could not scale horizontally to meet increasing demand.

Heluna rebuilt its backend and website on the Typesafe Platform (Scala, Akka, Play) using a three‑component design (Mail Accepter, Redis‑backed Mail Filtering with Akka actors, and Mail Delivery) and a Play/CouchDB front end. The new architecture scales easily on EC2, enabled massive parallel processing with low CPU/blocking, was implemented in about two months with a small codebase, and now reliably delivers over 300,000 clean messages per day while handling far larger spam volumes.

Heluna

Mark Beeson

Founder and Chief Architect