MailFrontier Socks It To Spam

With the amount of spam hitting corporate inboxes on the rise, enterprises are struggling with the resulting productivity losses and security threats. To stem the flow, MailFrontier Enterprise Gateway guards corporate e-mail networks and stops threats before they penetrate e-mail servers and inboxes.

MailFrontier secures e-mail connections and blocks unwanted e-mail while minimizing its impact on the timely delivery of legitimate e-mail. The solution provides comprehensive protection against spam, fraud, directory harvest attacks, virus attacks and e-mail policy violations.

FRANK J. OHLHORST Technology Editor

MailFrontier's hands-off approach can help ease the administration burden on IT departments. The mail- filtering engine uses dynamic, self-learning and self-running technology, which allows network administrators to "set it and forget it." The solution scales easily for enterprises of more than 100,000 employees.

MailFrontier can be installed on a Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris server system and uses LDAP integration to synchronize with existing user e-mail accounts. The product uses several filtering technologies to control spam, ranging from Bayesian filtering to blacklisting. MailFrontier also uses honeypot technology to attract spam, which it then fingerprints to improve blacklist-based filtering. The product combines these filtering technologies with a user voting system that allows users to identify e-mail as spam, improving the accuracy of the filtering process.

MailFrontier labels suspect e-mail as either "junk" or "maybe junk." Administrators use these labels to automatically delete or route messages to a designated location, such as a centralized spam folder. End users can receive a daily junk-mail report that lists senders, subjects and the status of suspect messages. Users can then choose to blacklist, whitelist, ignore or open the suspect e-mails. Solution providers also can set up portals to allow end users to control their own spam-filtering settings.

MailFrontier relies on McAfee for antivirus protection, while other security threats are handled by the fingerprinting and collaborative filtering technology. Administrators can also set their own spam policies.

The product offers integrated reporting tools that outline the amount and type of messages being blocked and its impact on the system's performance.

MailFrontier's two-level channel program offers technical support, sales and technical training, a dedicated partner Web site, demonstration software licenses and opportunity registration. In addition, partners are assigned a channel development manager, a channel marketing manager and a regional systems engineer who provide sales and integration assistance.

Pricing varies based on the number of accounts protected, and the average solution provider margin is 25 percent.

CHANNEL PROGRAM SNAPSHOTS
> MAILFRONTIER ENTERPRISE GATEWAY
COMPANY: MailFrontier
Palo Alto, Calif.
(650) 461-7500
www.mailfrontier.com
DISTRIBUTORS: Direct from vendor
TECH RATING:
CHANNEL RATING:

Note: Vendors can earn up to five stars for technical merit and five for their channel program. If the average of these two scores is four stars or greater, the product earns CRN Test Center Recommended status.