Cloudmark, Inc. has announced Cloudmark Gateway, a high performance edge mail transfer agent (MTA) that integrates with Cloudmark Authority, the companys messaging security solution.

The Cloudmark Gateway edge solution is available in a software or an appliance configuration based on the customers desired implementation scheme. Designed for carrier-class deployments, Cloudmark Gateway delivers complete control over message handling and policy enforcement at the edge of the network. As a result, the majority of unwanted email traffic is captured before it impacts internal messaging infrastructure and storage, significantly reducing overall system costs for service providers.

Today, most service providers combine an internal set of MTAs with a layer of edge MTAs to route email traffic coming into their organisations. The goal of an edge solution is to reduce email volume on the system at the networks edge by rejecting bad messages before they have a chance to clog internal messaging infrastructures. However, with spam, phishing and viruses now accounting for more than 95 per cent of all service provider email traffic, increasing demands are being placed on both edge and internal MTAs. Traditional edge MTAs have not been able to keep up with the growing rate and sophistication of todays messaging abuse as they provide only rudimentary, protocol-level filtering to weed out spam. In addition, traditional MTAs are not equipped to block the majority of bad email traffic because they do not have the capabilities to apply advanced policies or full content filtering without significantly degrading system performance. As a result, edge MTAs are only effective in filtering 50-70 per cent of all email traffic the rest still gets through to service providers messaging infrastructures.

Each Cloudmark Gateway server processes more than 3 million messages per hour with full spam, phishing and virus filtering. Cloudmark Gateway, leveraging Cloudmark Authority content filtering, processes messages 20-40 times faster than other edge solutions running content filtering. The result is an edge solution able to stop 90-96 per cent of total email traffic, reducing the amount of spam getting into internal infrastructures from 30-40 per cent to only 4-6 per cent. For service providers, Cloudmark Gateway significantly reduces the impact of spam and other forms of messaging abuse on their messaging infrastructure and storage.

[As emphasized in ISB on numerous occasions over the past ten years or more this is a better approach than filtering closer to the final spam recipient. However, it is even better to kill spam right at the first or second hop empowering backbone routers and gateways to filter traffic based on content, moving this kind of protection into the fabric of the internet rather than leaving it to individual service providers or end users. --Ed].

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