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. It can be integrated into an existing SMTP architecture to protect one or more domains, or act as its own standalone server appliance, which is an excellent feature.
Installation was very easy and we were up and running in minutes. The console itself is web-based and the configuration wizards made things very easy for our testers. The web-based dashboard is nicely organised 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 that are organised 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 message-specific options such as filtering on attachments, URLs and sensitive data.
All of the security and content management features are here, including high availability and clustering. Encryption can be set for gateway-to-gateway using TLS and is policy-based. The detailed 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 and whitepapers.
Support is available free for 90 days and includes phone and email support for eight hours a day, five days a week. Additional support packages are available.
At £3,710 for hardware only, or £4,820 for hardware plus one-year anti-virus/anti-spam subscription for unlimited users, FortiMail is good value used as an email security gateway or as a standalone email server capable of securing and archiving email.