Published on the site www.softwaremag.com

Security
Product Coverage (Mar 27, 2007)

MailSniffer Gives Companies Control Over E-mail

SearchInform Technologies is addressing information security head-on with the release of MailSniffer, a software application that provides full control over an organization’s e-mail traffic.

“Most of the company’s information is sent and received by means of e-mail, so it’s only natural that in most cases, unsanctioned information disclosure would also happen through e-mail,” notes Alena Siameshka, head of SearchInform Technologies’ public relations and marketing department. That is the need the company is addressing with its MailSniffer product.

The product intercepts all incoming and outgoing e-mail messages on the protocol level and stores all intercepted information in a database. It conducts full-text searches by key phrases in the heading and body of an e-mail as well as in any attached files. If MailSniffer detects a word or phrase from a previously created list of keywords in outgoing e-mail, it alerts the person in charge of information security.

The software provides the ability for the head of a department to have full access to each of its employees’ e-mail boxes while each employee retains access only to his or her own e-mail box. “Having control over your employees’ correspondence not only protects from insiders’ activity and any internal threats of information disclosure; it also lets you better evaluate the quality of your employees’ work,” Siameshka points out.

Some of the product’s major features include previews of correspondence history with one recipient, full-text search in messages and attached files, similar search, and user access rights differentiation. The similar search feature uses a mathematical algorithm to find documents similar in content to a given query.

SearchInform Technologies targets this corporate tool with its client/server architecture at all companies with large corporate networks and large amounts of information to process, index, and search, such as banks, law and audit firms.

Available for Windows NT/2000/XP, MailSniffer is priced at $1,000 for the corporate edition, which includes SearchInform Server and MailSniffer Server—both with support for three clients—as well as MailSniffer Client. Additional licenses start at $500 for five clients, with discount pricing available as the quantity increases. It would cost an organization $9,000 for 103 licenses.