Don't forget these days that it's not just written comments. Email can carry images, cartoons, and even sound clips that can be offensive or pornographic. You want to be able to detect these, and as far as possible, eliminate them.

To address these things, you need to be able to capture and scan emails and attachments for specific words, phrases, or other content, and if necessary, be able to target the email of specific people to do so. If you find what you're looking for, you need to be able to report it to those who will take action.

File attachments
File attachments can be a problem long after they have been checked for viruses and marked as clean. We've already mentioned that they can be used for carrying offensive material; they can of course also a carry away your secrets. The mere presence of them can be a problem too; huge attachments can clog up your network and servers, and there will always be files that just don't have a business purpose. Does your business have a need for MP3 files in your email? Can you cope with an issue where your marketing department needs to be able to deal with JPEGs, so that they can send images of your products to ad agencies, but you want to restrict them elsewhere?

SecuriQ.WatchDog helps here. You can build a list of file types, identifying them not just by name, but where possible, by binary patterns in the file, so you can't fool it by renaming files. Once file types are identified, you can block all of them, block by size, or block by sender/recipient. And you can even have these file types checked when they're inside zip files.

Encryption
Encryption is a two-edged sword. People need to encrypt sensitive mail so that it's protected from unauthorized eyes. Notes administrators all know that Notes has very powerful encryption features. That means that Notes users who share a directory can send each other encrypted mail. It also means that you can share encrypted mail with Notes users in other companies, if you exchange public keys. But what if the person at the other end doesn't have Notes and you want to send encrypted mail across the Internet to him?

To solve this one, you need to use a public key encryption system outside of Notes. PGP (Program Parameter) is such a one. But you don't really want to leave this up to your end-users to do, and anyway, you can't do this within Notes. You can also use S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), for which, as with Notes, you need to have exchanged public keys between the intended recipients. Or you can use a server-based tool like SecuriQ.Crypt. This can use tools like PGP to encrypt and decrypt mail at the Domino server. Doing it at the server means you can enforce encryption between specific sender-recipient pairs. You and also avoid the one serious downside of encrypted mail.

Encryption is, by nature, secretive. If a mail is encrypted, no one who doesn't have the keys can decrypt it. This means that the servers may also not be able to decrypt it. If a server can't decrypt it, how can it check for viruses in attachments, or deal with other content checking? The answer is it can't. That too goes for the whole SecuriQ family. But what it does do is enable you to specify what is to happen with encrypted mail that cannot be decrypted. You can define who may or may not send or receive such mail, or you can just stop all encrypted mail, if you feel that the threat it poses is more then encryption is worth.