Formerly known as IronMail, the Secure Mail product line consists of hardware appliances that are deployed at the network gateway and provide for the organization anti-spam, anti-malware, and data loss prevention capabilities for E-mail communications. Both inbound (anti-spam/anti-malware) and outbound (DLP) E-mail is examined, and the appliances themselves are offered in S-Class and E-Class flavors for SMB to Enterprise implementations.

A key technology leveraged in many of the appliance's features is the vendor's reputation-based TrustedSource information, which seeks to prevent communications from known malware/spam senders at the connection level based on their reputations and therefore prevent the overhead that would otherwise be necessary to accept and examine the communication data. Both the anti-spam and anti-malware mechanisms of the product leverage TrustedSource technology.

For spam control, the product applies both signature and content-based detection techniques, examining "thousands of characteristics for every message." Such characteristics are weighted towards the goal of producing a spam score for the message that can then be interpreted as to the probability of the message being spam. The vendor notes that the product's architecture is such that updated detection methods can be deployed to the machine (from the vendor) within 20 minutes.

For malware control, the vendor points first to their OutbreakDefender technology; which relies primarily on TrustedSource information and additionally provides feedback on examined messages to the global TrustedSource community. Additionally, the vendor states that the boxes can support up to three anti-virus engines (if desired by the customer).

Finally, data loss prevention is provided by the appliance via its ability to detect the transmission of sensitive data (sensitive content is identified via a combination of pre-built dictionaries/lexicons and document-based training tools that allow the product to learn what content is targeted), and enforce corporate policies that can include providing feedback to users or automatically encrypting sensitive messages.

As mentioned earlier, two primary classes of appliance are offered by the vendor: The S-Class offerings, for SMBs; and the E-Class offerings for Enterprise deployments. The S-Class is designed to support from 25 to 1000 concurrent E-mail users; while the E-Class is targeted to large organizations. (The previously offered C-Class appliances are no longer available.)

Also available from the vendor are the Secure Mail Edge and Secure Mail Encryption appliances. Secure Mail Edge is an optimized subset of the Secure Mail appliance (the proxy module only), providing only inbound E-mail scanning towards the goal of rejecting unwanted messages at the firewall (the vendor states that the Edge appliance is more optimized for memory-based scanning, whereas the Secure Mail appliances are a mixed memory/disk model); while the Secure Mail Encryption add-on appliance provides policy-based gateway-to-gateway and gateway-to-desktop encryption features. The Encryption appliance is currently sold as an add-on appliance to Secure Mail; the vendor states that it (the Encryption appliance) will be offered as a stand alone product later this year.

The Secure Mail appliances are available now, with pricing ranging from $1,995 to $24,995 for the hardware and E-mail Protection Subscriptions starting at $17/seat (volume discounts available).

Visit the Secure Computing Web site for further information.