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Despite the rapid growth in outsourced security services, most companies still prefer to keep in-house control of email scanning, policy enforcement and anti-spam measures, using one of the wide range of suitable devices currently available.
Tumbleweed Communications is targeting these firms with a complete firewall system that protects against spam, viruses and hackers and also delivers comprehensive content-filtering tools. The Email Firewall comprises a rack-mount unit bundled with Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000, and Tumbleweed's Messaging Management System (MMS) and Dynamic Anti-Spam (DAS) software. On the hardware side, the product has dual Pentium III 1.26GHz processors and 1GB of PC133 memory, with a pair of 80GB Maxtor IDE hard disks managed by an on-board Promise Raid controller
Installation can take a few hours, because each device has to be customised to suit its environment. Once up and running, the appliance can be managed remotely via a browser, either using standard HTTP or secure SSL sessions, and the interface is well designed and intuitive.
The Email Firewall intercepts all incoming and outgoing messages, analyses them using a wide range of tests and applies pre-defined policies to determine how they should be handled.
It does this by loading seven different services, the most important being the SMTP relay service that intercepts all incoming mail. The MMS compares mail against a database to decide whether to reject it or pass it on to the policy engine.
Administrators can also choose to subject each message to other simple tests such as limits on the number of recipients, maximum attachment sizes and RBL (real-time blackhole list) checks.
Open relay avoidance tools are also provided, while specific characters in mail addresses can be blocked.
A queue system is used to store incoming messages that need processing, those ready for delivery or any that have been deemed dubious, unacceptable or infected and require manual intervention. Spam gets an even tougher time as after a message has been cleared by the SMTP relay, the spam analysis engine applies an impressive range of techniques to determine a spam score. If a message is considered a spam suspect the engine adds a pre-defined header to the message that rates the content and the likelihood that it is spam.
Virus scanning is handled by McAfee's engine, and virus signature updates can be downloaded and applied at scheduled intervals. After this, administrators decide how mail is to be handled using the policy engine. Policies use sets of rules and conditions combined with actions. These seem simplistic but are very powerful and can be customised easily, allowing the administrator to enforce acceptable use policies for a wide range of circumstances. We found it simple to create a policy that took any incoming message deemed to have "adult" content, and placed it in a quarantine queue for further action.
The system's interface displays a range of valuable information including the status of each MMS service and warning messages, and it can be used to check on the current contents of each message queue and their configuration. Comprehensive reports are also provided and these can be exported into a variety of formats.
Spam can cause serious disruption to business operations. The Tumbleweed appliance can tackle spam problems effectively and offers a comprehensive security solution that looks particularly good value.
Price: From £10,000 + VAT
Contact: Tumbleweed 0118 934 7100
See also:
Tools, strategies and legal efforts for eradicating unsolicited email - plus advice on how to ensure legitimate email marketing remains both legal and welcome 27 Feb 2004All Firewalls
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