Tumbleweed Blows Past Anti-spam to Offer Enhanced Edge Defense

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Slightly positive on Tumbleweeds major new release of the MailGate Appliance platform, now considered the companys flagship product going forward, because it is no longer just an anti-spam product, but a full-fledged inbound, outbound standalone appliance and a mighty force in combating new sophisticated forms of spamming (via a new module called Edge Defense). The product is accompanied by a brand new policy engine with an attractive GUI and enhanced reporting capabilities.
• Vendor Importance: High to Tumbleweeds new version 3.0 of MailGate, because the revamped e-mail security product better positions the company to take on its traditional competitors, including IronPort, CipherTrust, and Symantec, and eventually Microsoft. These competitors are also enhancing their mail security detection capabilities to combat increasing spam problems.
• Market Impact: Moderate on the secure messaging market, because Tumbleweeds revised anti-spam product signals to the secure messaging space not only the need for centralized management and policy management, but also an edge defense against increasingly sophisticated invalid mail such as directory harvest attacks (DHAs), which have quickly become a significant part of customers e-mail traffic.

Current Perspective: Positive/Neutral

We are taking a slightly positive stance on Tumbleweeds new release of its flagship e-mail security product, MailGate. The 3.0 version includes comprehensive inbound and outbound e-mail security, a revamped dashboard with an easy to use GUI that provides a single point of management and a window into all of an enterprises e-mail security activities and servers. Perhaps most importantly, the product is taking a more aggressive approach toward new types of elaborate spamming techniques through its Edge Defense module.

Tumbleweed, which has 1,200 customers, has three products, MailGate, SecureTransport (for managed file transfer), and Validation Authority (for digital certificate validation). In recent months the company has focused much of its attention on overhauling its MailGate product (i.e., Tumbleweed also just announced a new 64-bit high performance hardware platform for the appliance to provide a significant performance boost, and the company also simplified the configuration requirements in the initial deployment of the appliances).

Tumbleweed has released the newest version of its secure messaging appliance, MailGate Appliance 3.0, for protection against inbound threats including viruses and spam, as well as outbound content filtering and policy management delivered on a new 64-bit appliance architecture. The product uses content analysis, reputation filters, artificial intelligence, and outbreak detection to combat spam, and relies on the AV engines from McAfee and Kaspersky to guard against viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware. Tumbleweed uses its own anti-spam engine. A key piece of the MailGate protection aims to combat what Tumbleweed calls Dark Traffic – described as invalid mail or spam precursors such as DHAs, e-mail denial of service (DoS) attacks, malformed SMTP packets, messages to non-existent recipient addresses, and other invalid e-mail messages. The product uses real-time SMTP connection analysis to detect Dark Traffic before it enters the network. This area of unwelcome e-mail has become a huge problem to organizations with some customers reporting to Tumbleweed it accounts for up to 90 percent of their e-mail traffic. The MailGate e-mail security solution consists of modular pieces of threat protection customers can chose from including: Edge Defense (to filter out Dark Traffic) spam protection, virus scanning, content filtering, policy controls, and encryption. These components are supported by a centralized management framework that supports reporting and auditing tools as well as other features.

There are some concerns with this announcement. Tumbleweed, like many others, is feeling Microsoft breathing down its back, and anticipates serious competition when the software giant releases its enterprise messaging security product in 2006. Microsofts product, called Antigen, stems from its acquisition of Sybari Software, and includes AV, anti-spam, and content filtering. Tumbleweed already faces strong, well-established competitors, namely IronPort, CipherTrust, and Symantec, which are also beginning to address this type of edge defense aimed at new forms of spam (and these vendors have solid brand recognition with high performance messaging appliances and similar filtering capabilities). For example, Symantecs Mail Security 8100 Series touts detection of new spamming techniques with the ability to block most spam before it reaches the network. The company has only just started gleaning new threat intelligence from its customer base when it recently automated the task of gathering data from customers through its product. This form of intelligence is very important to vendors research groups as a means of indicating threat trends and priorities. Tumbleweed does not have a strong reseller channel base, and so most of its products are sold directly. This new version of its e-mail security appliance would lend itself well to the channel.

Competitive Positive

• Tumbleweed has released the newest version of its secure messaging appliance, called MailGate Appliance 3.0, for protection against inbound threats including viruses and spam, as well as outbound content filtering and policy management delivered on a new 64-bit appliance architecture. The product uses content analysis, reputation filters, artificial intelligence, and outbreak detection to combat spam, and relies on the AV engines from McAfee and Kaspersky to guard against viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware. Tumbleweed uses its own anti-spam engine.
• A key piece of the MailGate protection aims to combat what Tumbleweed calls Dark Traffic – described as invalid mail or spam precursors such as DHAs, DoS attacks, malformed SMTP packets, messages to non-existent recipient addresses, and other invalid e-mail messages. The product uses real-time SMTP connection analysis to detect Dark Traffic before it enters the network. This area of unwelcome e-mail has become a huge problem to organizations with some customers reporting to Tumbleweed it accounts for up to 90% of their e-mail traffic.
• Tumbleweed has three products, MailGate, SecureTransport (for managed file transfer), and Validation Authority (for digital certificate validation), but the company is primarily focusing its current and future attention on the MailGate product, as shown in its recent product overhaul.
• The MailGate e-mail security solution consists of modular pieces of threat protection customers can chose from including: Edge Defense (to filter out Dark Traffic) spam protection, virus scanning, content filtering, policy controls, and encryption. These components are supported by a centralized management framework that supports reporting and auditing tools as well as other features.

Competitive Concerns

• Tumbleweed is feeling Microsoft breathing down its back, and anticipates serious competition when the software giant releases its enterprise messaging security product in 2006. Microsofts product, called Antigen, stems from its acquisition of Sybari Software, and includes AV, anti-spam, and content filtering.
• Tumbleweed faces strong, well-established competitors, namely IronPort, CipherTrust, and Symantec, which are also beginning to address this type of edge defense aimed at new forms of spam (and these vendors have solid brand recognition with high performance messaging appliances and similar filtering capabilities). For example, Symantecs Mail Security 8100 Series also touts detection of new spamming techniques with the ability to block most spam before it reaches the network. IronPort and CipherTrust are also known for having the industrys strongest reputation on filters used to analyze those sending e-mails.
• The company has only just started gleaning new threat intelligence from its customer base when it recently automated the task of gathering data from customers through its product. This form of intelligence is very important to vendors research groups as a means of indicating threat trends and priorities.
• Tumbleweed does not have a strong reseller channel base, so most of its products are sold directly. This new version of its e-mail security appliance would lend itself well to the channel.