During the past few years corporate e-mail security needs have expanded beyond simply fighting spam, leaving vendors to continuously enhance their products with related features in order to keep up.

Companies such as IronPort, CipherTrust, Tumbleweed, MessageLabs, Espion and Symantec continue a steady march beyond what two years ago was the defining task in this market - blocking spam. Today, companies need to protect themselves from more than unwanted e-mail, and are looking to their messaging security providers for myriad functions, including instant messaging and Web security, outbound e-mail encryption, policy enforcement and extra measures to fight viruses.

CipherTrust, for example, last week announced a product line designed to secure corporate IM communications. According to the Radicati Group, 54% of employees use IM at work, although CipherTrust says most of that communication goes unmonitored and unprotected.

Charlotte Pipe and Foundry, a PVC and cast-iron pipe manufacturer in North Carolina, has used CipherTrust's IronMail e-mail gateway appliance for two years and plans to test the new IronIM appliance for IM, says network administrator Charles Gautreaux. IM at his company has been sanctioned for some employees but never controlled, so Gautreaux is looking forward to features such as blocking unauthorized IM use and creating message logs, as well as protecting from spam and viruses.

"With what we are seeing out there in the wild, we see a great need for IM security and encryption," Gautreaux says, adding that CipherTrust's IronIM appliance is the only product he knows of that offers encryption on outbound IM.

Starting at $6,000, IronIM works with many IM services, including those from AOL, Yahoo and MSN. CipherTrust was able to leverage much of the anti-spam and anti-virus technology it developed for its e-mail gateway appliance in this product, says Alex Hernandez, the company's director of advanced product development.

The addition of an IM product to CipherTrust's security offerings is part of the company's plan to provide "messaging security for IT," Hernandez says. "We support all major [communications] protocols."