BorderWare is adding new filters to its MXtreme Mail Firewall to help customers better block spam, viruses and network flooding attacks.

With Release 6.0 of its MXtreme software, the company is adding MXtreme Intercept Engine that looks at e-mail content and mixes it with information about where it came from to determine whether it is spam.

MXtreme devices are typically deployed in secure network segments between firewalls where they examine all incoming and outgoing e-mail. With the addition of the Intercept Engine, the devices mix in protection against phishing, viruses and denial-of-service attacks.

BorderWare competes against IronPort and Tumbleweed, and its equipment when clustered can handle millions of e-mails per hour, making it suitable for the largest businesses and service providers, says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research.

The software also adds optional access to BorderWare Security Network, a network of BorderWare customers that shares its filtering data so that spam can be filtered. If a sender has been identified as a spammer by any of the members, that information is shared and when e-mail with that address arrives at any customer's site, MXtreme filters it.

If customers don't opt in to the security network, the gear still creates local reputation libraries of IP addresses from spam.

The key asset of the software is the ability to create policies per user, says BorderWare customer David Braucht, senior security engineer at Resource Computing in Spokane, Wash. In the past, spam filtering on the device was tuned to one level, but not all end users have the same need for filtering, he says. Some would rather get more spam but be sure they are not missing any legitimate e-mail that is misidentified, he says. Others want minimum spam arriving in their in boxes.

"Now the policy feature allows a default that is really restrictive for some users, and others can get a looser policy," he says.

The 6.0 software adds algorithms that automatically fine-tune the software during a learning mode to avoid false positives, something that was manual and time-consuming before, Braucht says.

New integration with Cisco IOS gear and F5 Big IP load balancers makes it possible to block unwanted e-mail traffic before it reaches the MXchange device, he says: "It lets you push the wall out even further."

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