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Products - PMDF | |||||||
PMDF offers:
In today's fast-paced environment, organizations are being driven to deliver superior products and services more efficiently, against increased competition, while achieving this with smaller budgets. Accurate and timely communications are critical to success. Messaging is the primary communication vehicle for dealing with customers, suppliers, business partners, vendors, and remote offices. Successful organizations and service providers demand a reliable and secure messaging backbone for effective communications. They require a flexible and scalable messaging product that can grow with their evolving needs. PMDF is a high performance standards-based Internet messaging product suite that ensures efficient and secure communications. PMDF includes a complete cross-platform messaging solution whether you're a small, medium, or large organization involved in e-business or any business. For over 10 years PMDF products have provided reliable and secure messaging worldwide to Fortune 500 corporations, governments, universities, and organizations of all sizes. Process Software products incorporate leading edge technologies and are backed by a dedicated customer support organization.
FLEXIBLE DESIGN PMDF has a functional modular design that can be customized to meet the growing needs of an organization. The PMDF–MTA (Message Transfer Agent) is the core product that serves as the messaging backbone (see Figure 1). It receives, stores, routes, and delivers messages. PMDF-MTA includes support for mail and directory standards such as SMTP (including SMTP extensions), MIME, POP3, IMAP, and LDAP. Modules can be added as well as mixed and matched to the core PMDF-MTA product to suit your organization's messaging requirements. A flexible channel architecture is integrated into the product set. As a result, these channels are more manageable and complement one another better than disjointed point-to-point solutions inherent in traditional gateway products. INTELLIGENT MAIL FILTERING ENGINE PMDF is a critical component of an organization's firewall implementation. A traditional firewall system controls what TCP/IP interactions are allowed between the external world considered to be unsafe, and an internal, protected environment, considered to be safe. PMDF augments the e-mail functionality of a traditional firewall by offering bulletproof SMTP server security. PMDF can act as an e-mail firewall by checking and controlling the e-mail passing between the internal and external environments. PMDF provides increased security over traditional firewalls with its intelligent mail filtering engine including the following features: SPAM PROTECTION - PMDF provides spam protection through its extensive filtering capabilities using SIEVE, a standards-based filtering language. This provides granular control over mail filter processing. System administrators decide what kinds of mail messages are permitted to be delivered to mailboxes by filtering on per-user, per-channel, and system-wide rules. Enforcing restrictions on what messages are allowed in or out can also protect against denial-of-service attacks. PMDF provides address verification facilities because spam messages often use invalid originator addresses. The PMDF SMTP server can take advantage of this by rejecting messages with invalid originator addresses. If the originator address does not correspond to a valid host name, as determined by querying the Internet Domain Name System (DNS), the message can be rejected. The PMDF relay blocking feature prevents spammers from relaying mail through your system to other systems. Finally, PMDF supports blackhole lists such as the Mail Abuse Prevention System's Real-time Blackhole List (MAPS RBL) by rejecting mail coming from sources identified by them as originators of spam. MAPS RBL is a dynamically updated list of known spam sources identified by source IP address.
VIRUS PROTECTION - PMDF can filter message content in cooperation with popular virus scanning programs to control and prevent the proliferation of viruses. In addition, system-wide filters can be created with PMDF that will discard or quarantine messages that contain suspicious phrases. LIMITING INFORMATION EXPOSED TO EXTERNAL NETWORKS - PMDF can limit exposing valuable internal information about your network to the outside world. With PMDF, system administrators can rewrite addresses into a central naming scheme and strip header information that is passed to external organizations. Removing this information makes your network an uninviting target for hackers. EXTENSIVE SECURITY Secure communications with remote offices, customers, vendors, or partners is critical for organizations. That is why PMDF provides a combination of leading standards-based authentication and encryption service options including Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), Secure Socket Layer (SSL), and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
INVESTMENT PROTECTION Real-world electronic messaging environments are frequently characterized by a heterogeneous collection of networks, protocols, applications, and user communities. The challenge that a system administrator faces is managing many of these incompatible systems. As a messaging backbone server, PMDF protects the investment of your existing mail infrastructure by providing interconnectivity between disparate e-mail systems (see Figure 2). Interoperability options include:
Although a directory is not required for the operation of the PMDF messaging backbone, PMDF also provides access with any X.500 and LDAPv.3 (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) compliant directories. For organizations that have not standardized on one directory type, PMDF offers a fully automated, highly customizable solution for synchronizing data contained in multiple disparate directories. All major directory formats are supported including, LDAP, Lotus Notes, cc:Mail, Microsoft Exchange, HP's ALL-IN-1, as well as both LDIF (the Lightweight Directory Interchange Format) and comma-separated flat files.
ADVANCED MONITORING/REPORTING - PMDF has extensive monitoring and logging capabilities for troubleshooting and capacity planning. PMDF's web-based interface makes it easy to monitor the health of your messaging system. The web interface can be customized. It gives system administrators the option of using JavaScript for enhanced monitor viewing. PMDF's facilities to collect and monitor counters are based upon the RFC 1566 standard. Every action of the mail process that occurs is logged with a timestamp and date, from entry of a message into the mail system to its delivery. Reports can be customized according to the needs of your organization. For example, statistics are provided on how many messages your company is receiving, when a message was sent or received, and load trends over time. Detailed user level activity reports and reporting of message types and sizes (including analysis of attachments) are also provided. The condensed logged data files can easily be exported to popular reporting packages for trend analysis.
RELIABLE MESSAGE HANDLING Backed by years of experience at thousands of real-world installations, PMDF has zero tolerance for lost messages. Since not all messaging systems comply with IETF standards, PMDF deals with a wide range of non-standard address types and provides conversion capabilities to standardize and legalize messages in order to ensure delivery. For example, PMDF converts document attachments from non-standard format to MIME. To ensure message delivery, PMDF also converts standard headers or MIME attachments to something that can be handled by e-mail servers known to be non-standard. PMDF gives incoming e-mail to virus scanners or document conversion software automatically. Also, document attachments can be received and read by users that may not have the same applications running on their computers. For example, a Word Perfect document can be converted to Microsoft Word and RTF format can be converted to text or Word. COMPLEMENTS MICROSOFT EXCHANGE AND OTHER COLLABORATIVE MESSAGING SOFTWARE PMDF provides users with a critical set of Internet-based features that complement collaborative software solutions such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes. While these collaborative solutions focus on user agent features such as calendaring, PMDF provides critical features needed in a messaging backbone solution. For example, Microsoft's Security Operations Guide for Exchange 2000 Server published on their website recommends "to protect your Exchange back-end servers from SMTP attack by using a separate SMTP gateway inside your network." Using PMDF results in better e-mail security, increased flexibility with more comprehensive messaging handling features, and integration of directories and multiple mail systems. PREREQUISITE SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE Please refer to the Software Product Descriptions on our Web site for each product's specific hardware and software requirements. MEDIA PMDF is available on CD-ROM. Please contact us for a quotation. | |||||||
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