FutureSoft DynaComm i:mail 3

DynaComm's i:mail is one of a team of three content security products from FutureSoft. It delivers email-monitoring and filtering tools that aim to scale from the small business to the enterprise. The software itself consists of two components: an SMTP server that handles all filtering duties and a management console. They can be installed on the same server or on separate systems. For testing we used Ipswitch's IMail Server 8 SMTP mail server and installed all the DynaComm software on the same system. In this environment, the only modification required was to change the SMTP port number on the i:mail server, so that our test clients still used the standard Port 25 but all mail was intercepted by the i:mail SMTP server first.

Installation is fast enough and you can start with a bunch of predefined rules that block common spam, undesirable content and stop all email attachments by stripping them from each message. The latter is somewhat Draconian, but existing rules may be modified to suit. The i:mail interface is well designed and you can view email activity from a monitor screen that shows all SMTP traffic in real-time. Whitelists ensure email received from a user, an external email server or a network is always accepted, and it's possible to add individual IP addresses, a network range using CIDR (classless inter-domain routing) notation or a local mailbox. Conversely, blacklists permanently block any mail traffic from specific sources. You can use the same criteria as for whitelists, but also choose from third-party lists of known problem sources.

Rules determine how i:mail filters messages, and these can be applied to incoming and outgoing traffic, or both. The rule-creation window provides seven tabs for criteria that may be applied to each rule. You can use a rule for internal or external domains, specific internal and external users, a time interval, by attachment or a category such as banned subjects or spam keywords. There's plenty of flexibility. You may apply more than one category to each rule, so a set of circumstances must be met for it to be activated, and further options are provided within each category. So you could filter by, for example, attachment type and size as well as user group membership.

The documentation makes a valiant effort to explain the various relationships, but we advise testing your rules first, as it's quite easy to inadvertently block more traffic than planned. Three action tabs are also provided with block or allow rules, so you can send notification messages to specific addresses, archive messages to a particular folder and have messages sent to a delivery folder where any attachments may be stripped off before they're sent. You can also set up independent archive procedures for copying messages to selected folders and placing custom text stamps in messages.

We found the i:mail rules a powerful means of controlling business email, although the relationship between each type is complex. Simpler products, such as BVRP's MailWarden, which offers more Wizard-based help, may better serve smaller businesses. However, larger companies looking to reduce email abuse and spamming will find i:mail a good choice, as it suits a wide variety of network environments.

Author: Dave Mitchell