Likewise, I created Favorites -- reports of, say, personal use and employment-related messages. Yet where this solution hits a home run is through custom searches, which are also simple to build with droplets. A few of the tests I ran identified employees who sent potentially harassing e-mail; found messages sent to a competitor's domain, and by whom; located messages to top investors; and determined top external domains sending employment information to employees. All reports can be run on a schedule and contents e-mailed to you.

InBoxer got a lot of recognition after the brilliant move of processing all Enron e-mails and making them publicly searchable with an Anti-Risk Appliance. Marketing aside, the substance behind that exercise can help any organization avoid fines and reduce risk. This solution's well-done e-mail archiving and searching, plus real-time policy management alerts, makes it fast and easy to stay in compliance and conduct investigations.

MessageGate Enterprise Email Governance 4.2.1

MessageGate's product takes a very sensible approach to this specific, albeit biggest, insider data-leak conduit. After operating in passive mode that captures all e-mail communications, you develop policies specific to your organization's culture and any problems uncovered. Also, unlike the other three products, MessageGate is a software solution with multiple components that you implement as needed. Besides flexibility, its distributed architecture is very scalable; a minimal three-server setup handles about 250,000 messages a day.

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At this solution's hub you'll find CORE (Console, Operations, and Reporting Engine) delivering Web-user interface and managing the remaining components. These pieces include a Message Adapter, for intercepting messages from your mail server; Message Analysis Service, which evaluates evidence provided by the adapter and then processes the necessary policy; and a Mailout component, for placing messages back into the mail stream after they're processed. (SenderConfirm's a standalone application based on the main policy enforcement engine; it flags e-mails that are out of compliance, notifies the sender, and lets the person either send or delete the message).

Although there are potentially several applications to install, my experience indicates MessageGate can be running in a day and generating assessment reports. Here you get a high-level view of e-mail activities, such as who sends the most messages and what type of files are attached.

After reviewing this scorecard, I was off to the Web console creating policies. Although policies can get extremely complex, there's noting involved in using the Policy Builder. Starting with basic routing (inbound, outbound, or internal messages), I quickly layered on criteria, like removing attachments of a certain file format that were not password protected.

I particularly liked the completeness of these actions (16 in total), which range from sending a confirmation notification to the originator and adding a disclaimer to placing the suspect e-mail in a review queue. Another nice touch is Enterprise Email Governance's policy test mode; this feature let me run real messages through a policy to make sure it's working right without actually invoking actions.

The software improves detection accuracy through dictionaries, where you enter specific terms or create regular expressions for, say, matching social security or bank routing numbers. Further, you can register content in text files and have MessageGate refresh this information on set schedule. That said, the system doesn't crawl document libraries, databases, or content repositories.