AT&T launches cloud-based e-mail service

Software from security software developer McAfee underlies a new cloud-based e-mail security offering from AT&T announced today.

“Customers that don’t wish to get into the hassle and expense of operating their own email services can outsource that to us,” said Joe Blanda, executive director with AT&T.

The new service is available in advanced and premium versions. The advanced version includes spam filtering as well as protection against viruses and malware based on multilevel filtering. It is backed by a service level agreement offering 99.999% up-time.

The premium version includes all of the features of the advanced version plus data loss prevention (DLP) and encryption.

“The most unique feature is DLP,” Blanda said. This capability search e-mails for inappropriate content such as social security numbers, drug codes or the like and prevents those e-mails from going through. Authorized personnel at end user organizations can establish the specific DLP policies they want to enforce using a drop-down pre-defined menu.

End user organizations also can specify how they want to implement encryption. For example, they might want any e-mails sent to certain recipients to be automatically encrypted. Alternatively, the software can be set up so that end users add encryption to individual e-mails using a special button.

The software does not automatically encrypt all e-mails because some may not contain any sensitive information and, as Blanda explained, encryption adds overhead, increasing file size and potentially slowing delivery times.

AT&T will also offer an archiving service, enabling customers to retain e-mails for as long as seven years. “Customers can export individual messages or groups of messages and generate administrative reports,” Blanda said.

Blanda declined to provide pricing on the new services but said they are calculated on a per-seat basis and use different tiers depending on the number of seats required.