Salvaging e-mail for the enterprise

CTOs looking for a solution to e-mail's many woes will have more tools to ponder this week, as the ETC (Email Technology Conference) wraps up its first show in San Francisco. Vendors including Cloudmark, Barracuda Networks, FrontBridge Technologies , and BorderWare Technologies used the conference to introduce tools for fighting spam, spoofing, and e-mail viruses.

Cloudmark unveiled Immunity, an enterprise anti-spam system capable of learning from feedback from workers.

Immunity is based on new infrastructure that stores and retrieves information while incorporating user feedback. The system combines two Cloudmark technologies that are designed to achieve 100 percent accuracy and zero false positives, according to Karl Jacob, CEO of Cloudmark.

"We realized a year ago that there were fundamental problems with the architecture of anti-spam solutions, including ours," he said. "You can't provide generic spam protection for everyone."

Immunity combines Email Genetic Mapping and nD Visualization  technologies to learn preferences of the enterprise and its employees, and give IT administrators a way to view and customize the technology. Immunity improves upon first-generation data structures, which lacked precision, Jacob said.

The result is an e-mail genetic map, installed at the gateway that is continually learning from feedback from workers at the desktop, according to Jacob.

The nD Visualization piece helps administrators see what is going on in the network so they can diagnose problems and optimize the infrastructure, Jacob said.

"It is a visual representation of a map of all messages that the enterprise is receiving including feedback," Jacob said.

Also at ETC, Barracuda Networks updated its Barracuda  Spam Firewall products with new anti-spoofing techniques designed to fight against phishing schemes.

The new features prevent an external email from appearing as if it came from inside the organization, according to Barracuda officials. Any email that is detected as a spoof is blocked or modified so that its origination is visible. The anti-spoofing feature also lets larger organizations specify a list of IP addresses that are allowed to have a "From" address that appears from inside the organization to support multiple sites and multiple email servers, company officials said.

BorderWare, meanwhile, unveiled its MXtreme  Mail Firewall Version 4.0 and a high end MX-1000  model for larger enterprises. MXtreme 4.0 bolsters its anti-spam technology with improved detection and accuracy and the addition of user-based spam quarantine and personal white listing functions. To improve manageability, MXtreme 4.0 integrates with SNMP-based enterprise management suites, and features full LDAP integration.

Targeting messaging security, FrontBridge at the show announced support for TLS  (transport layer security) across its global network. The addition of TLS support ensures a secure communication channel from a subscriber's email server to the FrontBridge network and a secure channel from FrontBridge back to the recipient, according to FrontBridge officials.