CipherTrust IronMail 210 By Richard V. Dragan February 25, 2003

• Product: CipherTrust IronMail 210
• Direct Price: $27,000 direct
• Company Info: CipherTrust Inc., www.ciphertrust.com

For corporations that want to keep infrastructure in-house, a hardware appliance is an appealing option. The CipherTrust IronMail 210 is the sole hardware solution we evaluate here, and it offers both antispam capability and general e-mail security. It is highly configurable and garnered top results on accuracy testing among the installed corporate products. It also costs more than most other solutions and requires more IT maintenance (though less than SurfControl). But CipherTrust staff will work with your company not only to tune the device but to implement a comprehensive antispam policy.

The IronMail is a rack-ready appliance powered by dual CPUs, 1GB of RAM, SCSI hard drives preconfigured for RAID-1, and two Ethernet ports. A hardware-based cryptographic card off-loads work from the CPU and improves througHPut. Once we connected the unit to our test network, we used the text-based console to set up basic options. Then we turned to the Web-based console to perform all other administrative tasks.

Of all the products we evaluated, the IronMail offers the most support for security protocols. Infrastructure options include support for IMAP, LDAP, POP3, and variants of SMTP (like SMTPI and SMTPO). It also offers passwords, basic certificate management, and excellent policy management. With all these options, you can easily get lost in the IronMail's console, and you'll need a thorough understanding of your network architecture. The interface would benefit from organizing options into basic and advanced features.

To combat spam, the IronMail uses an arsenal of techniques. The most significant for our testing was its statistical lookup service, which lets the device check a database of spam signatures in real time at CipherTrust's home office. Additional options include reverse DNS, real-time black holes, header analysis, and dictionary-based filtering.

As with SurfControl E-mail Filter, dictionaries for spam and pornography let you check for words from each category and assign point values. Customizable dictionaries let you protect private information. According to CipherTrust, you can expect to spend two to four weeks tuning the tool's options for the best results at your workplace.

Besides fighting spam, the IronMail spots suspicious behavior from malicious code and hack attempts on your e-mail server. It can flag multiple e-mails with the same subject and send alerts to administrators. Antivirus support is an option costing an additional $9.75 per user per year. You can also search for individual messages to check for false positives based on subject, sender, addressee, and date.

The IronMail creates reports using a dashboard-style master report that shows real-time IronMail activity in several graphs, including corporate-policy compliance. Instead of reports served up inside the console, as with most of the other packages, the IronMail automatically exports log files via FTP or SCP to other servers for a detailed picture of e-mail and spam activity.

The CipherTrust IronMail 210 is a good fit for midsize to large enterprises that want a top-notch, in-house spam-catching solution with plenty of security options.