Integration with other security tools is important: Those invested in a specific platform such as Azure, Google, Amazon, Dell-EMC, or Cisco, for example, are advised to favor products that most closely align with those platforms.ĮSecurity Planet editors reviewed a number of secure email gateway tools for a variety of use cases in arriving at this list.Some products focus only on inbound traffic others include both inbound and outbound.Some companies have their own dedicated threat intelligence tools others lacking such tools may wish to consider a secure email gateway tool that includes threat intelligence features.Effectiveness of any proposed product in detecting spam and malware.Whether deployment should be in the cloud or on-premises.There are several issues to consider when selecting a secure email gateway. As ransomware can shut down operations, the gateway should provide archiving and recovery protection in case email servers are affected.Provide IT and security teams with an easy way to manage quarantine queues, rejection queues, message tracking, and metadata to make informed decisions when investigating incidents.Protection regardless of email service platform (Microsoft 365, Exchange on-premises, Google, or hybrid).Look for authentication checks such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC to counter domain and sender spoofing.Scan inbound, outbound and internal emails.Identify and filter spam, viruses, phishing and malware from URLs or attachments.Key Features of Secure Email GatewaysĪ good email gateway will contain most of the following features:
Files found to be containing malware are held and suspicious files can be passed to a cloud-based sandbox for full detonation. Heuristics and behavioral analysis are often applied to enhance detection capabilities if no file signature is present. Regardless of the mode of deployment, email gateways protect organizations against malware and ransomware by providing robust scanning layers to identify and reject emails that contain malicious payloads delivered either by URLs or attachments. Some gateways are hardware appliances or servers, some are software-based or virtual appliances, and others are cloud services. In some cases, in-depth analysis is done on outgoing messages to detect and block the transmission of sensitive data. Generally speaking, secure email gateways are a specialized form of email server that filters incoming and outgoing traffic. They spot unwanted traffic such as spam, phishing expeditions, malware, and scams.
These gateways are either devices or software that monitor emails being sent and received. What is a Secure Email Gateway?Īnother critically important line of defense is a secure email gateway – and not surprisingly, analysts forecast double-digit growth for the secure email gateway market for years to come. That makes employee training a critically important defense – see our picks for the best employee cybersecurity awareness training tools. The bad news is that email security is not. The good news in that is that web and browser security are improving. Employees are duped into clicking on malicious email attachments and links.Ī recent HP Wolf Security report found that email now accounts for 89% of all malware. Executives are conned by fake emails into sending funds to the wrong places – or worse, giving up their privileged credentials. Phishing scams use it to compromise networks. Email is typically the channel through which ransomware and malware are unleashed upon the enterprise.