PineApp's Mail-SeCure 3000 is primarily an email content management appliance that operates in a gateway mode to ensure anti-spam, anti-virus and content filtering protection for most common email architectures. From a native product perspective, the appliance has the ability to provide TLS gateway-to-gateway encryption, but any additional granular message-based encryption is accomplished through additional third-party components. Installation of this particular appliance could have been a bit easier. All of the installation tasks were manual and we were not presented with any wizard-driven interfaces, which may make life easier for some administrators. However, once the product was up and running there are plenty of defenses in place to protect against spam, malware, phishing and data leakage (content filtering). The web-interface itself is easy to use and several of the tasks are logically organized. Performance of the appliance seemed a bit slower than most. Committing rule and configuration changes seemed to take a bit longer than what we're used to. This may be a direct result of the appliance's own capabilities, which touts more than 11 different anti-virus engines. All the typical enterprise features for high availability, reporting, logging and overall administration were excellent. If the buyer happens to be a Check Point customer, the device has a nice feature that uses OPSEC (operations security) and forwards IP reputation information directly to the firewall in order to offload the processing of those blocked connections. All in all, the device delivers on all of the content management features that you'd expect in order to secure inbound and outbound messages, despite the small dip in performance. From a documentation perspective, we were unable to locate any online help information within the appliance itself. This was very unusual for such a device with an important role in the enterprise. Unfortunately, users will have to defer to ancillary electronic or hard copies of the supporting materials for assistance. PineApp offers free eight hours a day/five days a week phone and email support, as well as a hardware replacement warranty for one year. Additional support packages, which include active monitoring and 24/7 support, are available. |