E-mail vendors tackle messaging deluge

Aiming to help corporations cope with volumes of e-mail messages, Sendmail and Ixos Software this week rolled out new e-mail management software.

According to IDC, the number of e-mail messages sent worldwide per year will grow from 48 billion in 2003 to 71 billion in 2007.

Addressing this growing need for e-mail control, Sendmail introduced a suite of management products spanning filtering, message management, and anti-spam tools.

The Sendmail Mailstream Flow Control Filter 1.0 allows administrators to throttle the number of e-mails moving into or out of the network, or to and from the Internet, Sendmail officials said.

The goal is to give enterprises and ISPs complete control over inbound and outbound message flow with flexible settings that can limit connections from problem domains and detect denial of service attacks.

“Flow Control detects these [problems] by keeping count of the number of connections and can throttle connections down when needed,” said J.F. Sullivan, director of product management at Sendmail.

Intelligent Inbox 2.0, part of the Sendmail Mailcenter product line, lets both administrators and end-users create personal delivery filters, manage password settings, and augment spam filtering with black and white lists.

Although 95 percent of the spam prevention fight occurs at the gateway, the last 5 percent at the user desktop level is still very significant, said Sullivan.

“Intelligent Inbox provides a further layer of management via a very intuitive Web interface. It saves overhead on mail servers and lets users set up specific anti-spam rules,” he said.

Lastly, Sendmail rolled out Version 2.0 of its Mailstream Anti-spam Solution, which combines Flow Control, selected Intelligent Inbox capabilities, and Cloudmark’s Authority spam tool. The offering is designed to isolate a number of anti-spam features and move them into a single product that is capable of fighting spam from the network perimeter down to the user desktop.

Ixos Software unveiled its Ixos e-mail Compliance Solution for SEC 17a-4, which is designed to help companies comply with specific regulatory requirements that focus on the use and retention of e-mail. In addition to SEC 17a-4, it is targeted at other securities industry regulations including, NASD Rules 3010/3110, and NYSE Rule 440.

The Ixos e-mail Compliance Solution is an integrated content management product that creates a structured process for searching, reviewing, and tracking e-mail messages according to compliance policies, according to Ixos officials. It is currently available for Microsoft Exchange environments, with a Lotus Notes version scheduled to be released next year.

At the nexus of the offering is a single content repository for e-mail and document management that offers secure document archiving, user authentication, and document distribution. The repository, dubbed the Ixos-eCONserver, can scale to manage millions of documents in a live system, company officials said.

By securely archiving data for specific periods on optical media or storage hardware, the product lets companies retrieve messages in case of an audit or dispose of messages according to best practices.