Symantec does mail gateway security

Symantec Monday plans to announce an update to its Mail Security for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol product that offers new features for cleaning up after mass mailing worms and identifying trusted mail domains, as well as improved capabilities for detecting unsolicited commercial (spam) e-mail messages.

Symantec Monday plans to announce an update to its Mail Security for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol product that offers new features for cleaning up after mass mailing worms and identifying trusted mail domains, as well as improved capabilities for detecting unsolicited commercial (spam) e-mail messages.

Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 4.0 is the latest version of the company’s gateway messaging security software and is designed to address key pain-points for enterprises: computer viruses, spam and the mess caused by mass-mailing worms such as Mydoom and Sobig, Symantec said in a statement.

Formerly called Symantec Antivirus for SMTP Gateways 3.1, Symantec Mail Security combines anti-virus, e-mail content filtering and spam prevention. It scans e-mail at the SMTP gateway before it reaches an organization’s mail server or user inboxes.

SMTP is a communications protocol that is used to send and receive e-mail messages on the Internet.

A new feature in Version 4.0 automatically collects and monitors so-called “trusted” Internet domains from which e-mail messages should be accepted without having to pass through the product’s heuristic spam filters and “blacklists” of banned domains. The feature will reduce false positives, in which legitimate e-mail correspondence is flagged as spam, Symantec said.

The new Mass Mailer Cleanup feature helps companies eliminate the flood of e-mail traffic generated by mass mailing worms such as Netsky and MyDoom. Many gateway antivirus products strip out virus-tinged e-mail file attachments or quarantine the e-mail message. However, Mail Security for SMTP 4.0 deletes the entire message and its attachment, reducing the amount of virus-generated e-mail that ends up on mail systems, Symantec said.

Other new features include the ability to customize spam filtering rules that look for specific text or keywords, as well as undesirable or offensive language and message content. Customers will also now be able to insert custom text, including legal disclaimers, to outgoing mail messages, Symantec said.

Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 4.0 will be available on Monday. Pricing for the product starts at $15 per user for licenses of 10 to 25 users. For a 2,000 user license, the cost is around $10 per user, according to a company spokesman.