Many email security products designed to protect against everything from common viruses to spam, phishing and sophisticated social engineering exploits are currently available, but the MailFrontier Gateway Appliance stands out from that crowd.

One reason is that MailFrontier has teamed up with IBM to put its software on tried-and-tested IBM xSeries hardware. Two types of rack-mountable appliances are available – the cheaper M500, reviewed here, which has a single Pentium 4 processor; and the more powerful dual-Xeon M1000.

The M1000 system can scan up to 100,000 messages an hour and is clearly aimed at large businesses and internet service providers (ISPs). The M500 better suits small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) but is still capable of scanning up to an impressive 50,000 messages an hour.

Both of these systems can be clustered to build even more scalable,
distributed defences. They use MailFrontier's Cognite technology to check the reputation of the transmitting mail servers, examine message content, validate embedded URLs and so on. The software can be hosted on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux (as on the review model) or Windows Server 2003. Both operating systems are security hardened with unwanted services either disabled or removed and there is no difference in price when choosing one or the other.

Arguably the most important feature of the MailFrontier appliance is the ease with which it can be put to work and managed, however. Many vendors make similar ease-of-use claims but MailFrontier does actually delivers on its promise.

The appliance must be attached to the network and some existing router and firewall configurations amended, notably to direct messages to the gateway rather than the corporate mail server. That is all that is needed for setup, however – no special technical knowledge is required to get the system running or to keep it that way using the simple browser-based GUI.

All updates needed by the system are retrieved and applied automatically.
Despite this simplicity, a lot of features are on offer, including antivirus scanning of both inbound and outbound messages using a mix of Kaspersky and McAfee technologies. All messages can be scanned for spam, phishing and other methods of attempted fraud, and the MailFrontier Cognite software checks messages in memory for maximum performance.

Suspicious messages can be blocked or deleted or, more usually, quarantined in a junk mail bin. Networks with a suitable LDAP directory – such as Active Directory – can leave users to manage their own individual junk mail folders.

Users can also be allowed to download plug-ins, for either Outlook or Lotus Notes, to gain direct access to the junk mail folder and manage their security settings.

Rules-based policies are another nice feature, enabling mail security to be tailored to suit the needs of particular individuals or groups. Plus there is a dashboard display to provide summary information; and an extensive set of reporting tools if staff need more detailed information.

The MailFrontier appliance can be used with any SMTP mail server, but offers additional functionality when deployed with Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes systems.

The only thing we did not like was the lack of information about deploying the appliance with other email and LDAP servers. That complaint aside, this is a good system and one that deserves a high ranking on any corporate shopping list.