Email spam and malware are serious problems in the business world. IT management of anti-spam systems—not to mention the productivity lost by inadvertently blocking an important message—comes with a significant price tag.
Given the cost and irritation surrounding spam and malware, the market is seeing an ever-growing number of options for dealing with the problem, ranging from hosted solutions in the cloud to software on the mail server. Sendio’s E-mail Security Platform (ESP) falls somewhere between those options: It's an appliance that sits on your network in front of your mail servers, protecting them from both spam and malware. The Sendio ESP 360 works on the premise of creating a trusted community of recognized mail contacts. The result, according to Sendio, is zero false positives.
The system doesn’t scan content but rather verifies senders. It scans outbound mail for malware and captures details of the receiver, constantly adding those trusted people to the senders' personal mail community. The theory is that you no longer have to maintain complex filters because processing is based on the sender's identity. The system sends unknown senders a challenge query, and—if they respond correctly—adds them to the trusted community.
Setup
The system is reasonably easy to install and configure, and the supplied documentation is excellent. You simply slot the unit into a 1U rack space, attach a monitor and keyboard, and power it up. Initial configuration is keyboard-based, from a clunky Linux GUI on the device console. You must set IP addresses, check for updates, set zone/time sync, and verify that services are running correctly and that the various available communication methods are possible.
After setting up the basics, you open the web-based interface to set up directory sync, which is flexible and worked flawlessly in my test Active Directory (AD) environment. You then jump back to the Linux interface for a few more tasks, and finally finish off the setup process in the browser interface. Both interfaces are fairly unattractive, and I'm not sure why so much configuration has to be performed from the Linux box's keyboard.
You need to ensure that you import a list of contacts into the device; administrators can import these as global contacts from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and end users can use their Microsoft Outlook contacts. If you fail to do this, all your trusted partners and clients will get challenged the first time they send you mail! This process could be challenging for many users who aren't accustomed to importing and exporting from Outlook. Another challenge would simply be gathering a full contacts list. Mine, for example. doesn't contain half the people I mail to. Outlook 2010 has a useful Suggested Contacts feature that assembles a massive list of people that you've mailed to. However Outlook 2010 is only in beta right now, so users whose mail clients don’t have a similar feature will find this step difficult.
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