XO Communications this week announced the availability of an e-mail security and disaster recovery service.

Perimeter E-mail Protection is an addition to the CLEC's current e-mail and hosting service delivery platform designed to provide businesses with assistance in combating increasing costs associated with Internet junk e-mail, denial-of-service attacks and viruses.

The service provides:

· User Validation -- compares incoming e-mail against legitimate e-mail users provided by the business and rejects unwanted e-mail before it arrives at the customer's server.

· E-mail Protection -- provides on-premise mail servers with protection against e-mail based denial-of-service and dictionary attacks, as well as spam.

· E-mail Disaster Recovery -- reduces loss of all incoming e-mail if the mail server goes down and delivers e-mail when the server is restored.

· Reporting -- provides daily reports on how a business' e-mail server is being protected.

Perimeter E-mail Protection is targeted at new customers and existing customers using XO and Concentric Hosting services, XO Dedicated Internet Access and bundled services from XO.

XO joins several Bells offering e-mail security services. BellSouth recently unveiled a service that allows its business DSL customers to encrypt outgoing e-mail.

AT&T offers encryption on its client software for its Business Internet dial-up service, and Verizon also has an e-mail encryption service for businesses called Verizon Secure Mail.