Fortinet FortiMail-400B

Fortinet's FortiMail-400B is a hardware appliance that secures inbound and outbound email messages and is marketed more toward the medium-sized business market. The appliance can be used in transparent mode or as the primary email server within the organization. The solution is mostly focused on blocking malicious attacks and unsolicited mail through anti-malware and anti-spam mechanisms, but also contains content-based filtering as well.

Initial setup came with one small hiccup. Although we were pleasantly surprised to see multiple setup options, the documentation did not disclose the actual URL path needed to set up the appliance correctly. Once this was resolved, configuration was easy and the appliance was up and running with little effort.

Users who are familiar with Fortinet's other product offerings will notice a familiar look and feel to the interface. Many of the screens appear to be modeled on its firewall line of products. The interface and setup of core features is much less user-friendly and takes a longer learning curve than we'd like. Although some of the naming conventions for various options can be a bit cryptic, the appliance has several powerful administrative features that will satisfy the demands of many enterprise environments - high availability, health monitoring, SNMP, syslog, archiving, etc. The anti-spam features are excellent and even include a mobile reputation score based on MSISDN [Mobile Subscriber Integrated Services Digital Network Number]. Other features include anti-malware, IP reputation validation and a web-based remote authentication module for external users to access corporate email. The appliance does have the ability to scan content for keywords and regular expressions, but those filters have to be configured from scratch.

We found the documentation to be interesting. The file names of the offline documentation are very cryptic, but the content inside of the files is excellent and thorough.