In-Depth

Two Services for the Enterprise

Defend your large enterprise with these spam stoppers.

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 10/01/2003

IntelliReach (www.intellireach.com) offers its MessageScreen system in several configurations. It’s available as a hosted off-site solution or as an appliance that you can place at the edge of your own network. Either way, it acts as an SMTP gateway, accepting all incoming mail and then deciding which messages should be allowed to get to your real mail servers. Most customers choose the appliance, which ships with a set of starting rules that are maintained by IntelliReach. The customer can also add their own custom rules to tweak the configuration to match their own mail.

IntelliReach rules use a score-based heuristic approach that considers the headers, keywords, addresses, and other factors in deciding whether a message is spam or not. This fall it’s planning on adding a cutting-edge image recognition module as well, which will actually look at Web-based images linked to e-mail and determine whether they’re innocuous or not. Spam messages can be deleted outright or quarantined. Where MessageScreen stands out is in letting users manage their own quarantined mail. By using LDAP permissions and a Web-based interface, they make it easy for end users to double-check the appliance’s spam decisions. The system starts at $2,500 for 100 users for one year, plus a charge for the appliance if you decide to go that route instead of using the hosted service.

Tumbleweed Communications (www.tumbleweed.com) calls its Messaging Management System an “e-mail firewall.” Tumbleweed also offers hosted and appliance-based solutions; the appliance is a recent edition to its product line. Its focus is on large enterprises, and it says that a single gateway can handle dozens or hundreds of back-end Exchange servers. Its goal is specifically to block unwanted e-mail before it gets to the Exchange organization.

MMS uses multiple heuristics at the e-mail firewall to recognize spam, and the company offers new heuristics as a service. These can be automatically pushed down to the firewall so that your company can largely ignore the need to tune the filters. Recognized messages can be quarantined, put into a review queue, or have a message added to the subject line or headers. The services of MMS extend beyond spam filtering to include virus detection, secure messaging, and even content filtering that understands common document formats. Pricing starts at $20,000 per installed CPU for the software version of the product.