Roping Off Quarantines in the Gateway

Security software vendor McAfee is pooling quarantine queues from its appliances to make them more manageable for administrators.

The McAfee Quarantine Manager is a free add-on component to the Secure Messaging Gateway and Secure Internet Gateway appliances. It provides a central repository for questionable e-mails that hit a corporate network -- spam, viruses, potentially unwanted programs and, in some cases, legitimate e-mail wrongly marked as spam.

Quarantines are another protective step from false positives, or e-mail that is mistakenly marked as spam and jettisoned to the digital trash can. Instead of automatically deleting what could be an important sales invoice or a valid marketing message, the system places them in a queue that users and administrators can access and rescue from oblivion.

The quarantine manager helps end-users browse through their quarantine file to find e-mails they mistakenly marked as spam. It also sets up and manages whitelists, e-mail addresses that are specifically allowed to go right to the inbox, and blacklists, which are specific e-mail addresses automatically blocked.

End-users can peruse their quarantine by either logging in and sifting through the e-mails in an Outlook-like environment or they can receive a daily spam digest of all the messages received during the day.

For e-mail server administrators it's a time-saver, providing a central management center for all quarantined e-mail on its appliances.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.