Fortinet Fortimail 400B

Fortimail 400B is an appliance-based email security solution that helps secure email both at the protocol and content layers for inbound and outbound messaging. The appliance can be integrated into an existing SMTP architecture to protect one or more domains, or act as its own standalone server appliance.

Installation was very easy, we were up and running in minutes. The console itself is web-based and the configuration wizards made things easy for our testers. While most appliances in this category act as gateways for existing SMTP architectures, Fortimail can also be used as a standalone mail server, which is an excellent feature. The web-based dashboard is nicely organized and easy to navigate. An interesting "first" for our lab was the fact that the administrative interface has a main menu button available for changing the theme for your GUI.

The Fortimail appliance has an excellent set of features, which are organized logically throughout the interface. The ability to control inbound and outbound messaging is very easy through a series of profiles, policies and granular configuration options that execute at the IP, domain and sender level or via message-specific options, such as filtering on attachments, URLs, sensitive data, etc. All the security and content management bells and whistles are here, including high availability and clustering. Encryption can be set for gateway-to-gateway using TLS and this is policy-based. The granular enforcement of policies that can trigger on any number of messaging components is quite powerful. Our only gripe is that the content-filtering dictionaries are not pre-populated. However, you can add your own terms using pattern matching and regular expressions.

The help file included in the appliance was adequate, but we encountered several references to pages or links that were empty. However, the Fortinet website contains many useful support features and additional product documentation, white papers, etc.

Support is available free for 90 days and includes eight hours a day/five days a week phone and email support. Additional support packages are available.