Built by someone who’s been protecting email since 1997.
mxio is created by Thomas Johnson — the founder of FrontBridge (acquired by Microsoft as one of their first cloud services) and MailRoute, the longest-running independent email protection platform.
Origin Story
From spam crisis to cloud pioneer
In 1997, Tom Johnson was running a web hosting business that included free mailboxes for clients. He quickly discovered where all his time was going: not growing the business, not selling useful tools — managing spam and viruses in those free mailboxes.
“I need to solve this spam and virus problem, or I’m going to be managing free mailboxes for a living.”
He built a hosted email filtering service instead. A cloud service before anyone called it “cloud” — a proprietary network of servers that filtered inbound mail before it reached the customer. Formally launched as Big Fish Communications in 2000, the company was later renamed FrontBridge Technologies.
Microsoft acquired FrontBridge in 2005. It became the foundation of their cloud-based Exchange Hosted Services — later rebranded as Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), and now part of Exchange Online Protection. It was one of Microsoft’s first cloud services.
Track Record
27 years in email protection
Tom’s career in email infrastructure didn’t start with FrontBridge.
Bought one of the first Mac 128Ks as a UCLA freshman. Started programming in 68K assembly, then C. That’s what led to the Computer Science Department — and to the Internet.
Staff at the UCLA Computer Science Department — ARPANET Node #1 — working under Leonard Kleinrock, widely recognized as the father of the Internet. Ran internet infrastructure for the department and worked with Jon Postel at USC’s Information Sciences Institute on early commercial Internet projects.
Left UCLA to rebuild the American Medical Association’s online community, US HealthLink (later acquired by Medscape, now part of WebMD). Built an early search engine and an early distributed application — cloud computing, a decade before the term existed.
Started building hosted email filtering. Launched formally as Big Fish Communications in 2000, later renamed FrontBridge Technologies.
Founded MailRoute — self-financed, founder-led email protection for corporate, government, and educational customers. Still operating continuously, over two decades later.
FrontBridge acquired by Microsoft. The core technology is still running inside Exchange Online Protection.
Founded mxio to bring email authentication management to organizations of every size.
The Pattern
The biggest players keep disappearing
Email filtering has a pattern: large companies acquire the category leaders, then let them atrophy.
Google acquired it in 2007, then discontinued it.
McAfee acquired it, then shut it down.
Symantec acquired it for $695M, then neglected it.
Microsoft acquired it in 2005. The core technology is still running inside Exchange Online Protection, largely unchanged.
That’s why Tom founded MailRoute in 2002 — to maintain continuity, independence, and innovation in email protection, outside the acquisition cycle. Self-funded, founder-led, no outside investors waiting to flip it. MailRoute has been protecting email continuously for over two decades while the acquired players came and went.
That same conviction led to mxio.
The pattern repeats because email filtering is resource-intensive. Public companies don’t want to invest in it when they have higher-margin products to sell.
Email authentication has the same problem, but worse. SPF records break silently. DKIM keys rotate (or don’t). DMARC policies sit at p=none for years. The tools that exist today will show you raw data, but they won’t manage the problem — and the enterprise platforms that do manage it charge $5,000/year or more.
mxio exists because email authentication management shouldn’t require an enterprise budget.
How We Work
Our approach
We do email authentication. That’s it.
Not mail flow. Not delivery. Not filtering. Not hosting. We manage the DNS records and policies that determine whether email gets delivered to the inbox or the spam folder.
We fix what others only report.
Free tools diagnose any problem in seconds. Paid plans monitor and manage the fix. Managed SPF keeps your record correct automatically.
We’re not going anywhere.
mxio is independently built and self-funded. We don’t need to sell other pieces of a platform to justify our existence. The founder has been building email infrastructure for 27 years and isn’t done yet.
See what we built.
23+ free tools, no signup required. Check your domain’s email authentication in seconds.