Product Details
Product Rating
avecho.com
DynaComm i:mail
eTrust Secure Content Manager
Gordano Messaging Suite
IronMail 305
Kerio MailServer
Mail-SeCure 2040
MailScan for SMTP Servers
MAILsweeper
NetIQ MailMarshal SMTP
OrangeBox Mail
SurfControl E-mail Filter
trimMail
Best Buy is awarded to CipherTrust IronMail 305 for its turnkey appliance solution that provides a more comprehensive range of email security tools than any other product in this group test.
Recommended award goes to NetIQ MailMarshal software for having such a wide range of security-policy and content-control features at a very affordable price.Also Recommended is avecho.com’s outsourced mail security service, which is suitable for businesses of all sizes, but is a particularly simple-to-implement and cost-effective content management solution for smaller businesses that may not even have their own mail server.
Mail security (2004)
It is possible, and even likely, that 50 percent of your company's incoming email is spam. Think about what that is costing you. Geoff Marshall finds help
Mail security involves all aspects of security concerns that arise out of sending and receiving emails via the internet. It encompasses anti-virus, anti-spam, and other forms of content analysis, and it involves protecting your own email servers against misuse.
Other desirable security features can include attaching legal disclaimers to all outgoing mail, ensuring all aspects of company email policies are observed, encryption of emails, secure delivery, and verification of sender. We left out products focused on encryption and reviewed general-purpose, wide-ranging, mail security products (some of which might incidentally include encryption). Some products are part of a complete content-management suite that can be integrated on one gateway machine to perform email, web (http, ftp) and instant messaging (IM) filtering.
Content analysis monitors all of a company's internet traffic, whether it is coming in, going out, or moving internally. Content filters can ensure there are no objectionable words, phrases, pictures, files, or other content. A content filter can eliminate pornographic emails and its possible legal implications and can also prevent employees from sending company secrets to competitors, a feature we call confidentiality checking.
Anti-virus is a feature that is easy to implement once you have a content analysis engine. Most mail security products incorporate, or allow you to incorporate, your own, anti-virus solution from a third-party specialized vendor. However, an email security product also needs to look at scripts embedded in the body of email messages, these are usually html and might be undesirable for several reasons, including that they could be deliberately damaging or viral.
For businesses, spam is more than a nuisance. It's a threat to security because unwanted emails are entering the company, and those emails might contain scripts, viruses, and links to unsavory websites. Spam also affects the bottom line when employees spend time deleting it or, worse, responding and forwarding it. Typically, over 50 percent of incoming email is spam.
If spam is taking up half the capacity of your systems, you're spending serious money to store and deliver it. Businesses lose money when spam overloads the network and its servers, which can lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
Spam and other nuisance email can be blocked by preparing a list of hosts you wish to block, or using a public realtime blackhole list (RBL), which is a current, online list of known spammers and open relays. Other anti-spam techniques include reverse IP lookup to eliminate some spoofed origin traffic; validation of sender domains; and using Dial-up User Lists (DULs) because dial-up users don't usually have their own SMTP mail server.
Bayesian filtering offers a statistical approach to filtering spam by determining the probabilities of individual words and features being used in spam. Each inbound message is assigned a value that is calculated based on data collected from both legitimate and spam messages. This provides the most accurate method of spam detection with the fewest false positives.
Bayesian filters can learn what is spam and what is not, either by analyzing separate large collections of known spam and good messages, or by continuous training on what you regard as spam (this requires some user feedback).
Confirmation process is another anti-spam technique, which asks each new (unlisted in your address book) sender of email to respond to an automated request to confirm their intention to send an email to the recipient. When they respond by simply clicking on a link in the reply email, the original email is delivered and they are added to your address book so they don't need to repeat the process. This approach is designed to take advantage of the fact that most spammers use false or non-existent return addresses.
Mail security can be tackled with special software that you load on your existing email server or on a dedicated email gateway platform; with a hardware appliance that acts as an email gateway; or with an outsourced service provider, like avecho, which we tested.
Outsourced services can block spam, viruses and other dangerous content before they reach your network by rerouting email through an off-site data center. The advantage is that you don't have to waste your valuable hard drive space storing unwelcome emails, and your email server doesn't have to deal with undeliverable messages or directory harvest or dictionary attacks. These hit the service's servers, not yours.
Hardware appliances aren't necessarily any better than software tools, but you don't have to go out and buy your own server, as you might with software products, so they are more of a turnkey solution. Hardware solutions can, however, be more hardened against attack without relying on your skills to harden a server before installing a software solution, and can also protect your email gateway against hackers and DoS attacks.
