Tumbleweed Releases MailGate Appliance 3.0 to Deliver Comprehensive Inbound and Outbound Email Security; Powerful Dashboard Provides Single Point of Management and Visibility for All Email Security Functions and Servers

Business Wire, Oct 11, 2005

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Tumbleweed(R) Communications Corp. (Nasdaq:TMWD), a leading provider of email security, managed file transfer, and identity validation appliance and software products, today announced the release of MailGate Appliance 3.0, the latest version of Tumbleweed's award-winning email security solution. MailGate Appliance 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art protection from spam, viruses and other inbound content threats, while adding new network layer edge defenses and bi-directional content filtering and policy management, all delivered on new 64-bit appliance architecture. This added functionality moves the MailGate Appliance 3.0 well beyond a dedicated anti-spam point-product, to a comprehensive email security solution.

"The first and second generation point email security products are necessarily being replaced by integrated solutions," said Peter Christy, Principal Analyst of the Internet Research Group (IRG). "The competitive challenge for the industry is to move beyond feature set competition to comprehensive system offerings that address diverse customer requirements, are highly manageable and provide flexible hardware, software and operating system platform options."

Comprehensive Inbound Defense Blocks Spam, Viruses, and Dark Traffic

While spam, phishing, viruses, and spyware continue to represent a huge problem for enterprise email systems, a new type of threat has begun to gain visibility. "Dark Traffic" currently represents as much as 80% of all inbound email traffic, and is made up of spam precursors like directory harvest attacks (DHA), email denial of service (DoS) attacks, malformed SMTP packets, messages to non-existent recipient addresses, and other invalid email messages. Most email security solutions available today have no visibility to this kind of illicit traffic, which flies under the radar of traditional content-centric spam defenses. Identifying these kinds of messages requires a product that can intelligently analyze SMTP connections for bad behavior and invalid messages, and throttle the sources of this traffic.

MailGate 3.0 offers multiple modules to stop inbound email security threats:

--MailGate Antispam combines content analysis, reputation filters, artificial intelligence, and outbreak detection into an integrated, easy-to-manage anti-spam solution delivering 98% capture rates. It is backed by Tumbleweed's global Message Protection Lab, a team of threat engineers who continually track and analyze spam 24x7 - human review greatly improves accuracy.

--MailGate Antivirus protects organizations against viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware with integrated anti-virus engines from McAfee and Kaspersky.

--MailGate Edge uses real-time SMTP connection analysis to identify and throttle invalid Dark Traffic before it enters the network, reducing inbound email traffic by as much as 80%.

Next-Generation Policy Management and Content Filtering

In addition to protecting against evolving inbound threats, Tumbleweed MailGate 3.0 now offers integrated email policy management and content filtering, allowing organizations to address a number of email security challenges, including regulatory compliance and leakage of private or sensitive data. More and more, organizations are required to monitor and manage the content of email messages sent from their domain because of laws or industry regulation, including HIPAA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Sarbanes-Oxley, California SB 1386, and various international privacy laws. Organizations are also concerned about the large number of recently publicized customer data privacy breaches, as well as ensuring that intellectual property such as trade secrets, patent information, designs, and other proprietary information is not sent to unauthorized recipients.

Utilizing Tumbleweed's ten years of experience in managing email policy, MailGate 3.0 offers a next generation policy management and content filtering module to address outbound email security challenges:

--MailGate Policy Manager allows organizations to easily define and enforce custom policies based on the content of a message or the identity of the sender or recipient, and take actions to quarantine, return, drop, re-route, annotate, add disclaimers, modify headers, or tag messages. MailGate Policy Manager includes policy templates for HIPAA and GLBA policy violation monitoring, including a set of standard reports for compliance analysis and auditing.

"The management dashboard on MailGate 3.0 is fantastic," said Scott Rose, senior infrastructure architect at Finisar Corporation. "I get total visibility to all of my inbound and outbound email traffic, I can manage all my email security policies and message queues, and I can drill down and manage all four servers in my deployment from one place. We were frankly stunned to find that over 70% of our inbound email traffic was invalid -- our old anti-spam solution completely missed this."

64-bit Appliance Platform

Designed to provide comprehensive email security, MailGate Appliance uses Tumbleweed's new 64-bit appliance hardware based on AMD's Opteron CPU. This new appliance platform offers unsurpassed email performance, with the 1U version processing 375,000 messages per hour and the 2U version processing 500,000 messages per hour.