Secure Computing

CipherTrust Edge is positioned at the perimeter of the mail system, controlling email traffic at the network border – rather than at the mail server or desktop. Edge uses TrustedSource, CipherTrust’s best-in-class reputation system, for information about every sender, to allow or reject email before it even reaches your critical mail servers.

Key Benefits and Functionality

Powerful Spam Protection

The global sender profile provided by TrustedSource allows Edge to allow or reject email messages at high speeds, based on a quick IP lookup operation. Edge maximizes speed and efficiency by caching the TrustedSource data locally, with regular updates streamed from the central TrustedSource server. Using the TrustedSource data, Edge can:

• Reject Without Retry Request – When a known bad sender, such as a spammer or hacker, tries to connect, Edge rejects the connection immediately. The sender receives an error code telling them not to retry the connection, as it will only lead to another rejection.
• Reject With Retry Request – When a suspicious sender, i.e., one that has either not been previously encountered or has sent bad mail in the past, attempts to connect, Edge will reject the connection, but will ask the suspicious sender to retry. Legitimate senders will receive the request and resend the message, which will be accepted. Conversely, spammers and phishers typically will not retry since resending messages is expensive, and their mass-mailing programs don’t include “retry” logic.
• Allow Without Conditions – Messages from “good” senders will pass through the Edge appliance to the mail server without any processing. Edge will not acknowledge to the sender that the message has been received until the mail gateway confirms it has received the message.

Enterprise Throughput

Edge can protect organizations of any size, with throughput* of up to 3 million e-mail messages per appliance per hour.

* throughput includes receiving the connection request, performing a TrustedSource query, and handling the message per one of the three actions above.

Failsafe Email Delivery

Edge is interoperable with all existing mail security gateways and mail servers. Additional functionality includes round-robin load balancing and fail-over between next hops for all mail gateways. If all mail gateways are unavailable, Edge will write the messages to disk, and will reattempt delivery intermittently until a mail gateway is available.

Simple Setup and Administration

Edge is easy to install and maintain. The CipherTrust SmartStart wizard-driven set-up is intuitive, guiding the administrator through a simple point-and-click interface. CipherTrust advises administrators of exactly which settings will work best in their environment based on current best practices in use by over 4000 IronMail appliances around the world.