Steve Ashmore, technical manager for Northern Europe, Middle East and Africa at the Sunnyvale, California-based company, said it expects to launch the auto-white-listing function towards the end of this year, with the capability being built into Junk Mail Manager, which sits on Mirapoint’s RazorGate security appliance.
Beyond that, Mirapoint is readying what Ashmore called policy management techniques for email at the organisation, department or group level. The idea is to enable companies to set directory-based policies for managing their messaging environment, with compliance clearly a major driver.
This will be an enhancement to the Mirapoint Operations Console the company already markets for managing multiple RazorGates (up to 30 per console) and will enable network admins to set policies about what should be archived and in what format.
A lot of the categorization and forwarding of messages is already in the product, but we need to build in the hierarchical management so that individuals can be nominated to manage business units or divisions within a company, he explained.
This policy-based messaging capability will be brought to market after the enhancement to Junk Mail Manager, most likely in 2006.
It is not surprising that a vendor of email security software should be thinking compliance and archiving. The same is already happening with companies such as MessageLabs and Postini that offer email security as a managed service, so in as much as, in Ashmore’s words, a lot of customers face the choice of deploying a server or a service, it behoves the software vendors to follow suit.
