Astaro Debuts E-mail Spam Fighter For SMBs

Everybody hates spam. It clogs inboxes and online traffic, cuts productivity, and holds out false hope of riches, romance, and hair. Astaro's new Mail Gateway is designed to help your company deal with spam and other e-mail issues without spending a lot of money.I once posited a world where All Spam Is True. A slightly more realistic goal is a world where dealing with spam isn't a problem.

I'm not sure the Astaro Mail Gateway will get your company there, but the company says the new appliance offers email encryption, spam and virus protection and remote exchange access, giving small- to medium-sized businesses comprehensive, easy-to-manage mail security.

The Mail Gateway is a hardware/software combination that includes free email encryption, and uses patented, reputation-based filtering to boost spam detection and reduce false positives. It also uses a parallel virus scanners that independently receive virus pattern updates to cut reaction time to new malware outbreaks.

Astaro senior VP Alex Quinonez told me that small and midsize companies increasingly recognize that "spam is a productivity inhibitor", and need an easy to setup, maintain, and scale solution. He said that even non-IT people understand spam, so Astaro's appliance is designed to let users manage their own accounts, setting up their own white lists and so on.

The appliance approach is also important. Matching the hardware and software in a single product, Quinonez says, dramatically lowers support costs, since it's much easier to diagnose any problems.

Astaro is offering the Mail Gateway appliance at half price -- starting under $500 -- until December 31, 2008. (The software alone is $365, and companies with fewer than 10 users can get a free version.) And according to Quinonez, the Mail Gateway already offers twice the performance at half the price, compared to competitors like Barracuda, SonicWall, Cisco and Fortinet.