Gordano beefs up mail server security

Messaging server vendor Gordano last week released enhancements for its mail server designed to help stem the flood of spam and provide an extra dose of anti-virus protection.

The upgrades, which are for its Gordano Messaging Server (GMS) 11, provide an outbound anti-virus capability that checks e-mail being forwarded from the server or exchanged through collaboration. For example, if a user schedules a meeting and attaches a spreadsheet to the meeting request, the file will be scanned before being exchanged with another user.

Gordano also is adding support for the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which uses the DNS to validate that e-mail is indeed coming from the domain it claims to be coming from. SPF is one of a handful of methods of validating the e-mail sender, including DomainKeys, DomainKeys Identified Mail and SenderID.

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Messaging server vendor Gordano last week released enhancements for its mail server designed to help stem the flood of spam and provide an extra dose of anti-virus protection.

The upgrades, which are for its Gordano Messaging Server (GMS) 11, provide an outbound anti-virus capability that checks e-mail being forwarded from the server or exchanged through collaboration. For example, if a user schedules a meeting and attaches a spreadsheet to the meeting request, the file will be scanned before being exchanged with another user.

Gordano also is adding support for the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which uses the DNS to validate that e-mail is indeed coming from the domain it claims to be coming from. SPF is one of a handful of methods of validating the e-mail sender, including DomainKeys, DomainKeys Identified Mail and SenderID.

"They are covering all the bases in terms of any holes in the dam, anything that can happen as the result of malicious e-mail, says Chris Williamson, president and CEO of Market Web Solutions, a hosted e-mail provider. "Covering all those bases from a system point of view is very beneficial to us."

Williamson says reducing his infrastructure workload is key. "It helps reduce our workload considerably when we don't have to deal with messages that contain malicious content."

Click to see: Spam stats

Embracing SPF

Gordano also is adding SPF support even as the usefulness of the technology is being questioned.

While SPF was initially greeted with promise for thwarting spammers, mail-filtering company MX Logic recently released its findings on e-mail security that noted that SPF and Sender ID authentication protocols aren't widely used and that spam-sending domains continue to represent their biggest adopters.

Gordano officials say SPF support is just another security option.

"SPF is not completely fool-proof but nothing is," says John Stanners, managing director for Gordano. "People with the knowledge can spoof where the IP addresses mail is coming from - in which case all authentication bets are off. But SPF will help with a lot of the current spam that is around." Stanners says this is the case because a lot of spam comes through free mail services such as Hotmail.

Gordano competes with Stalker, Rockliffe, Mirapoint, Scalix, IPSwitch and Sendmail. GMS also competes with Microsoft Exchange and IBM/Lotus Domino, especially with customers migrating away from those platforms.

GMS is priced at $28 per user, which includes GMS Mail, GMS WebMail, GMS Collaboration for sharing of calendars, contacts, tasks and notes in Outlook, and GMS Web Organizer for Web-based sharing of calendars, contacts, tasks and notes.

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