Tumbleweed Communications on Tuesday announced a new version of its MailGate messaging security appliance that defends against threats from botnets and adds data-leak prevention.

Slated for release in July, the latest version of MailGate features a real-time IP reputation filter installed at the edge of a company’s network that automatically drops connection attempts from known spammers and botnets, according to company officials. The reputation filter checks a database of more than 100 million IP addresses to determine if the inbound connection request is from a legitimate sender or not, and drops those connections deemed unwanted.

In addition to this reputation filter, Tumbleweed’s recipient verification, traffic shaping, and message throttling capabilities block directory harvest and denial-of-service attacks to help ensure that inbound messages are legitimate, they say. Combined, these approaches can eliminate up to 90% of unwanted e-mail before it even reaches the corporate network.

The new version of MailGate also includes data-leak prevention and content filtering capabilities that enforce corporate policies regarding what can be e-mailed outside of the company and which data needs to be encrypted, officials say. These features can enforce policies regarding the sending of credit card and social security information and also include a dictionary that outbound messages are scanned against to flag certain words in financial, healthcare, and other industries that may hint to a message being encrypted via the included TLS technology or blocked, they say.

One existing Tumbleweed customer, an enterprise messaging manager at a large healthcare company who asked that her name and company not be used, is looking to upgrade to the next version of MailGate to take advantage of the integrated content-filtering capabilities on the outbound side.

“It’s very important to us, HIPAA is absolutely the most important thing” in terms of monitoring outbound e-mail, she says. The organization will also take advantage of the integrated TLS encryption, which it’s already using with some of its partners, she says.

The upgraded appliance also features a new administrator interface to ease policy management, reporting, and message tracking, officials say.

The new version of MailGate will be priced starting at $5,000.