Regulators and common sense are dictating that e-mail messages be secured, and that users be protected from phishing attacks and identity spoofs. . . .
Hijacking financial and personal consumer information from the Internet has become such a growing menace, that government regulations now require financial and healthcare industries to shroud their transactions and communications with high levels of security. That has opened the development floodgates for a wide range of technologies including encryption, filtering, and authentication.

Although secure e-mail solutions can be deployed internally by IT departments, most vendors offer managed service approaches for handling secure e-mail distribution, and also offer services that include technologies to filter inbound e-mail for viruses and spam. At large enterprises this often is the practical course because, according to industry experts, more than 80 percent of inbound e-mail messages are spam, carry viruses, or are phishing scams that coax recipients into revealing their credit card and Social Security numbers and passwords.

Current market leaders offering secure e-mail technologies are Postini, Tumbleweed and PostX, but there are other rising stars including FrontBridge, Sigaba, NetIQ, Brandimensions, Websense, PHP Universal and CipherTrust. Encryption is the most logical method for sending e-mail, but successful deployment relies on technologies that enable any desktop browser and operating system to receive and decrypt those e-mails without using special client software.

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