E-mail is the new corporate communications medium, and no wonder. Why hunt for a phone number or herd people together for a conference call when you can shoot off a quick e-mail message? Of course, what makes employees' jobs easier often presents new challenges to IT. The growing reliance on e-mail has made the mail server not only a critical component of the enterprise infrastructure but also a target for virus attacks and a potential means of leaking sensitive corporate information. How can the IT staff efficiently and effectively monitor and maintain an ever-growing e-mail system?

Mirapoint Inc. has an answer in its Message Director 300 (MD300), a secure, enterprise-scale messaging appliance that can be used to enforce corporate policies governing e-mail communication without burdening your mail servers. The MD300's content filtering provides administrators with the tools necessary to protect sensitive documents and guard against viruses and spam, preventing breaches of both policy and security.

Built for speed

The MD300 appliance is optimized for message delivery. Running a hardened derivative of FreeBSD Unix and configured with a 1GHz P III processor, 768MB of RAM, RAID controllers, three 36GB SCSI hard drives, and redundant power supplies and cooling fans, the MD300 provides high availability and performance. According to vendor tests, it can handle 68,000 messages per hour.

The MD300 sits in front of your existing messaging system, usually in a demilitarized zone, serving as a gateway for incoming and outgoing mail. Incoming mail that conforms to the configured policy is forwarded to the internal mail system for delivery, and outgoing mail that conforms to policy is forwarded to the Internet. Messages that violate policy rules are blocked.

Adding the MD300 to your messaging environment gives you a central point of administration for policy and reporting. And because the MD300 sits in front of your messaging environment, instead of integrating with it, installing the unit is simple and straightforward.

Setup is also easy. You simply turn on the appliance and configure IP address settings on a keypad attached to the front of the device. After that, you download the Java-based GUI client to complete the process. We initially ran into difficulties downloading the Java client, but restarting the system and reconnecting the network cables quickly solved the problem.

The MD300 uses Trend Micro's Interscan Virus Wall to scan attachments. You can scan all attachments or define specific extensions, such as .exe and .vbs. If an infected message is found, the administrator is notified. Administrators can choose whether or not to send a virus warning to the sender, recipient, or both, and whether to pass the e-mail (i.e., send it as if nothing is wrong), send it to a quarantine address, delete the infected attachment, or disinfect the attachment.

You can also use Trend Micro's eManager anti-spam dictionary to keep unsolicited e-mail off your network. Realtime Blackhole List lookups are also available. The MD300 prohibits message relaying by rejecting messages that do not originate from or are not destined for an address on your network.

Management made easy

Among the MD300's best features are its strong logging and reporting capabilities. You can review message statistics for every message sent from or delivered to a local recipient, and you can review a log of all SMTP transactions for any given day. These logs can show you who is sending e-mail to a competitor or who sends a lot of nonbusiness messages. Analyzing these logs can help you better enforce your e-mail usage policies.

The MD300's mail queue management is also very good, giving you the ability to view outgoing messages in the queue. If mail service suddenly bogs down, you can quickly and easily see if someone is trying to send a video file or other huge attachment, which you can remove with the click of a button.

Another nice feature is the ability to send encrypted messages using SMTP over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security), creating what Mirapoint calls a virtual private messaging network. If the recipient mail server is another MD300 or RFC 2487-compliant system, you can easily send e-mail over encrypted channels to prevent eavesdroppers from reading the contents of messages as they travel across the Internet.

At US$26,000, the price of the MD300 is a little steep for small organizations, but large enterprises and service providers will definitely find this appliance to be a good investment. Considering that each e-mail virus outbreak could cost your company as much as $500,000 (according to estimates by ICSA Labs), the MD300's anti-virus protection alone could yield a quick ROI.

» posted by abennett

InfoWorld

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