Proofpoint tracks e-mail's path

Proofpoint announced Monday an appliance designed to help IT departments trace and analyze the path of inbound and outbound e-mail messages.

Smart Search, priced starting at $13,000, is a dedicated appliance that works with Proofpoint’s e-mail security gateways to log and report on e-mail that has traveled through the system, according to Andres Kohn, vice president of product management.

The new appliance, based on a licensed version of Splunk’s IT Search engine, gives Proofpoint customers one central spot for searching on information about an e-mail message without having to access the messaging appliance, Kohn says. This gives IT help desks the tools they need to quickly answer user inquiries about lost e-mail messages or to determine whether employees are violating corporate e-mail policies, he says.

Being able to give the help desk the power to answer such inquiries without having to grant them access to the actual e-mail messages – which could violate privacy laws – would be a significant benefit, says Sharon Finney, information security administrator for Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, Ga., which has 3,300 e-mail users.