Spam Fighters Strut Stuff At Lotusphere

CipherTrust this week plans to unveil IronMail 4.0, an updated e-mail security appliance that adds three more spam-fighting techniques. "This version is all about spam, this ongoing battle," said Paul Judge, CTO for the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company. The product is slated to make its debut at Lotusphere 2004 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

"We're using a holistic strategy--not just content filtering, not just spam traps, but multiple techniques--and then we correlate the information coming from each" to determine what is good mail and what is spam, Judge said.

The update adds an anomaly-detection engine and whitelisting, as well as an Enterprise Spam Filter that combines blacklist checks, reverse DNS lookups, URL filtering, content filtering, spam traps or honeypots, and statistical lookups, the company said.

"Instead of triggering just on the blacklist or just on DNS lookups, they've meshed something like the 10 best technologies and put confidence and trust values on each," said Don Planchon, corporate sales manager for NwTech, a San Diego-based security integrator.

CipherTrust also gathers the questionable messages and sends the users a digest so they can sort through it for false positives, he added.

For security and mail integrators, spam is top of mind among customers. "There's just continued concern. Everyone wants added protection," said Rick Basich, president of National Business Group (NBG), an Atlanta-based security specialist.

IronMail starts at about $25,000 per appliance. The update is covered for customers on maintenance.

At Lotusphere, CipherTrust rival Postini plans to demonstrate how Perimeter Manager Enterprise Edition can protect Lotus Domino and Notes shops.

Also at the show, relative newcomer Brightline is expected to show off the alpha version of its upcoming portal server, which can be linked into existing Domino environments to provide an open-source portal and standard portlet applications such as a mail browser, discussion databases and online collaboration documents.

And, as first reported by CRN, IBM's Lotus Software group will highlight a new "rich" client and a server that bundles app serving, portal, content management and collaboration talents but not Domino itself (see story for more on the Lotus news).