The M+Guardian from Messaging Architects is a pre-configured, drop-in MTA appliance that provides for the organization policy-based E-mail anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, and more for both inbound and outbound E-mail streams. The appliance is offered in two 1U flavors: The RFM100, a single processor (Intel Celeron) box with an 80 GB drive and a 10/100/1000 port; and the RFM1000, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor system with dual 250 GB drives protected by RAID 1.

The vendor states that a single M+Guardian server can support over one million messages per day; and the product supports automated clustering capabilities (the devices automatically detect each other and cluster together) including load balancing and automatic message recovery in the event of a node failure.

The platform features the ability to define and enforce role-based policies that govern its processing and filtering of E-mails. It sports an embedded version of Novell's eDirectory for stored configuration options; and, according to the vendor, offers full interoperability with AD and OpenLDAP. Anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, and attachment blocking parameters can thus be defined by network, domain, group, or user.

Features of the platform include:

- Automated updates of virus and spam signature information

- Integrated A/V scanning from ESET (a second scanning engine from McAfee is optional) with signature and heuristic identification features

- Three spam identification engines with support for the inspection of E-mail attributes, body content, DNS/MX record verification, etc.

- Support for content filtering and attachment blocking (keywords and regular expressions supported)

- Quarantine capabilities and the ability of end users to self-manage quarantined E-mail through E-mail itself or a Web-based GUI. Features of this system include one-click message release, support for user-defined and managed allow/block lists and spam severity levels, and support for the creation of single quarantine reports per user (regardless of the number of E-mail aliases a user has).

New features in the latest M+Guardian release include enhanced routing capabilities allowing for the configuration/enforcement of encryption policies; the ability to re-route designated messages for priority handling in a clustered environment; and a redesigned, WARP-based spam quarantine.

M+Guardian is available now. Visit the vendor's Web site for further information.