Secure Mail 5.5 sharpens spam-fighting tools

Saying it’s responding to customers’ calls for more lethal spam-fighting tools, Tumbleweed Communications is releasing an updated version of its Secure Mail product featuring a new spam analysis engine and update service.

“Our enterprise customers have been asking us for more help with spam,” said Tumbleweed senior product marketing manager Dan Maier.

The release of Secure Mail 5.5, due out early in the second quarter of this year, is designed to further address enterprise customers’ spam concerns within a full package of e-mail security and content management tools.

In addition to the software’s virus protection and policy management capabilities, Secure Mail 5.5 offers an analysis engine that applies statistical and “heuristic” analysis to e-mail traffic to identify spam. Heuristics analysis identifies patterns that are common to spam, allowing companies to block mail with those patterns.

The company is also rolling out an Internet-based update service that publishes new heuristics to the analysis engine to automate the administration of spam filtering.

Damon Fischer, a systems engineer for Best Buy, uses Secure Mail 5.0 and said he plans to upgrade to 5.5 in good part because of the Internet update service.

“We want to reduce the administrative effort of tuning our spam filters … with 5.5 some of that will be automated,” he said.

Fischer added that although spam has become an increasing problem for his company — Best Buy blocks some 40,000 spam e-mails per day — the company does not have one person handling filters.

“We don’t have all the resources we would like to work on spam,” he said.

Fischer is hoping that Secure Mail 5.5 will lighten the company’s load. But although Fischer is enthusiastic about the new Internet update service, he said he will probably turn off the heuristic analysis tool since he fears that it may identify legitimate business mail as spam.

“I’d have to test it quite a bit to make sure it wasn’t catching real mail,” he said.

Maier acknowledged that companies can’t afford to lose mail that’s business critical, but said that Secure Mail 5.5’s false positive rate is low. He also added that the new product catches 80 percent of spam out of the box, before customers have tuned the filters to suit their needs.

“You can’t use a cookie cutter approach to stopping spam,” Maier said, “but our customers are finding a lot of value in having a single application that controls e-mail.”

Tumbleweed said that it would not quote pricing for Secure Mail 5.5, but that it was on a cost per unit basis.