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Network Associates Inc. this week plans to unveil a spate of new capabilities in its GroupShield and SpamKiller products for Microsoft Corp.s Exchange and Lotus Domino.
The two solutions now are designed to work in concert as a suite and include a host of content-filtering and analysis functions to help administrators reduce the number of unwanted e-mail messages entering users in-boxes. McAfee GroupShield 6.0 for Exchange and GroupShield 5.3 for Domino are compatible with SpamKiller 2.1; both GroupShield products have essentially the same feature sets.
GroupShield now is capable of scanning e-mail traffic at the SMTP transport layer before it enters the Exchange or Domino message store. Administrators have the ability to define rules by which the software will analyze each message.
For example, GroupShield can be set to look for offensive words or phrases and malicious file and content types, said officials at NAI, based in Santa Clara, Calif.
GroupShield also inspects outgoing messages that are leaving protected mail servers, looking for the same kinds of violations as it does on inbound e-mail messages.
When it is installed with GroupShield, SpamKiller can be managed from a common interface through McAfees ePolicy Orchestrator. While GroupShield hunts for offensive messages, SpamKiller uses a massive set of rules to assign each e-mail a positive or negative score that expresses the likelihood that it is spam.
SpamKiller looks at the header, layout and makeup of each message to look for telltale signs of spam. It then applies heuristics and checks each message against administrator-defined white lists and blacklists of trusted and untrusted senders. The system also has the ability to learn which messages a user wants by absorbing the characteristics of the e-mail messages the user approves for delivery.
GroupShield and SpamKiller are available now.