Linux ciphertrust software

Appliances ease anti-spam administration

While the fight against unwanted e-mail marches on, many appliance vendors have recently tuned their anti-spam products to make them easier for corporations to use.

New releases from CipherTrust, lntelliReach and Mirapoint focus on easing the administrative burden by making their products easier to install and use.

These vendors and others continue to try to keep pace with the latest spammer tactics by pushing software upgrades out to users on a regular basis. This gives the product upgrades for updated administrator and end-user tools better packaging options and additional operating system support.

"A good spam filter can get you to around 90% blocked spam. Once you're at that range, what companies look for is how efficient the products are in terms of blocking spam," says Matt Cain, an analyst with Meta Group. "What many products can do is lighten up the load on the administrator, moving him from [fighting spam] eight hours a week to four hours a week."

CipherTrust this week will release IronMail 4.5, an upgrade to its gateway appliance's software that adds end-user quarantine management. This feature lets end users build their own whitelists. In previous versions only a company's administrator could create such lists on a group-wide or company-wide basis; with Version 4.5 individuals can manage their own lists and relieve the administrator of that task, says Matt Anthony, the company's director of marketing.

Administrators can set the software to automatically create whitelists for end users or to let the IT department review them first.

As part of IronMail 4.5, CipherTrust has enhanced the software's message analysis capability, which tracks a blocked message's path through IronMail to determine why the software labeled it spam.This reporting feature replaces the need for administrators to search through multiple logs when end users want to know why a message was blocked, Anthony says. "The administrator doesn't have to spend nearly as much time answering that question, which is where the pain point is," he says.

Version 4.5 also features a revamped GUI, better integration with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and works with Microsoft's Active Directory to validate recipients. IronMail 4.5 costs $9,500 to $30,000, depending on the size of an organization.

IntelliReach this month announced an upgrade to its MessageScreen anti-spam and contentfiltering appliance that integrates with Microsoft's Outlook or Novell's Groupwise e-mail clients so that quarantine management can be performed directly by the end user, says Jeff Coveney, product manager. The software, which employs multiple techniques to scan messages for more than 8,000 spam characteristics, also features a Web-based quarantine tool for remote management and lets end users request spam reports - detailing statistics such as how many spam messages one user receives per day

Also with Version 4.3, IntelliReach has released a version of the product for SuSE Linux, priced on average at $10 per user. The Solaris version, which has the same feature set, is priced at $10 per user, Coveney says.

This week, Mirapoint will announce a new bundling of its messaging hardware and software aimed at corporations, including the company's anti-spam filters. Called the Enterprise Eclipse Program, this package includes the company's appliance hardware and software for enterprise e-mail including POP and Internet Message Access Protocol e-mail, personal and group calendaring, Web mail, wireless e-mail access, synchronization with Outlook and wireless devices, and spam and virus protection, says Jeff Brainard, Mirapoint's senior product marketing manager. The bundle costs $100 per user for a company with 5,000 employees.