REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Tumbleweed® Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: TMWD), a leading provider provider of of email security, managed file transfer, and identity validation appliance and software products, today announced the release of MailGate Appliance 3.0, the latest version of Tumbleweed’s award-winning email security solution. MailGate Appliance 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art protection from spam, viruses and other inbound content threats, while adding new network layer edge defenses and bi-directional content filtering and policy management, all delivered on new 64-bit appliance architecture. This added functionality moves the MailGate Appliance 3.0 well beyond a dedicated anti-spam point-product, to a comprehensive email security solution.

"The first and second generation point email security products are necessarily being replaced by integrated solutions," said Peter Christy, Principal Analyst of the Internet Research Group (IRG). "The competitive challenge for the industry is to move beyond feature set competition to comprehensive system offerings that address diverse customer requirements, are highly manageable and provide flexible hardware, software and operating system platform options."

Comprehensive Inbound Defense Blocks Spam, Viruses, and Dark TrafficWhile spam, phishing, viruses, and spyware continue to represent a huge problem for enterprise email systems, a new type of threat has begun to gain visibility. “Dark Traffic” currently represents as much as 80% of all inbound email traffic, and is made up of spam precursors like directory harvest attacks (DHA), email denial of service (DoS) attacks, malformed SMTP packets, messages to non-existent recipient addresses, and other invalid email messages. Most email security solutions available today have no visibility to this kind of illicit traffic, which flies under the radar of traditional content-centric spam defenses. Identifying these kinds of messages requires a product that can intelligently analyze SMTP connections for bad behavior and invalid messages, and throttle the sources of this traffic.

Tumbleweed Communications Corp.