The Top 11 Email Security Gateways
Compare The Top 11 Best Email Security Solutions. Examine Email Security Features Such As Phishing Protection, Reporting And Admin Controls.
Email security should be a top priority for your company. Email is the number one target used by hackers to get access to your company’s private data, and email attacks such as phishing and business email compromise are on the rise. Your first line of defence should be an Email Security Solution, a platform which guards your emails against hackers, spam and viruses.
There are many Email Security Gateway solutions available. Some are targeted towards enterprise users looking for granular admin controls and advanced functionality. Some are better suited for smaller businesses looking for an easy to use platform with a good price point.
To help you find the right solution, Expert Insights has identified some of the top email security solutions. These are deployed using different cloud based technologies including Secure Email Gateway (SEG), API integration and Mail Flow Redirection. We’ll take you through their key features, their functionality and how well they work.
Want to read independent reviews of all the top Secure Email Gateway platforms? Click Here.
The Top 11 Email Security Solutions include:
SpamTitan | Proofpoint | Abnormal Security | IRONSCALES | Mimecast Secure Email Gateway | Microsoft Defender for Office 365 | Avanan | Trustifi Inbound Shield | Barracuda Essentials | Cisco Email Security | Libraesva
SpamTitan
SpamTitan is a leading secure email gateway platform that provides comprehensive protection against email threats including spam, malware, ransomware and phishing attacks. SpamTitan is built on a powerful spam filtering platform, with a market leading catch rate of 99.99% and a false positive rate of 0.0003%. Alongside spam filtering, SpamTitan provides advanced protection against sophisticated phishing attacks, scanning all inbound emails in real time and filtering out malicious content, including links to phishing webpages and malicious attachments.
SpamTitan provides top threat protection against both inbound and outbound email threats. The platform provides multi-layered threat protection for inbound emails, with CEO Impersonation protection, phishing and protection, URL analysis, attachment sandboxing, ransomware protection, SPF/DKIM/DMARC checking and encryption. SpamTitan prevents phishing and whaling attacks by scanning inbound emails in real time, providing a strong level of inbox protection. Alongside inbound email, SpamTitan allows admins to set up powerful data leak prevention rules which help to stop outbound email data loss. SpamTitan allows admins to easily configure their threat protection policies, including the ability to set allow/deny lists, customize DLP rules and set policies by user, domain and domain group.
SpamTitan is an accessible and easy to manage platform, with a comprehensive SEG feature set. The service is simple to use, and easy to deploy, easily integrating with existing email systems. SpamTitan works well as an extra layer of security for Office 365 accounts, providing enhanced threat protection and reporting for Office 365 email users. This protection is backed by their responsive and knowledge technical support team. SpamTitan is popular with customers, who praise the service for its ease of deployment, cost-effective pricing and high-quality technical support. We recommend SpamTitan as an easy to manage email security solution for SMBs, enterprises, MSPs and resellers.
Proofpoint Essentials
Proofpoint is a market leading email security gateway, and the world’s largest email security vendor, with annual revenues of over $1bn. Proofpoint Essentials is Proofpoint’s solution for small and mid-sized organizations. Essentials is a strong solution for email protection, encryption, archiving and continuity, delivered as a single platform, with a single admin console. Proofpoint have an unparalleled visibility into email threats with their global threat intelligence platform that spans email, social and mobile. Other vendors rely on third party threat intelligence, which can be less accurate. Proofpoint collect and analyse more than 100 billion data points a day from more than 100 million email boxes, 200 million social-media accounts, and 7 million mobile apps. Proofpoint secure more than 50% of the Fortune 100, the top 5 banks globally and 7 of the top 10 global retailers.
Proofpoint provide the best protection against email threats, with effective spam protection and detection, powerful URL defense and dynamic content filtering. Essentials is a cost-effective solution, with many features such as archiving, and encryption included as part of the Professional package that would otherwise be expensive add-ons. Essentials provides a range of reports and logs to give you more control and awareness over your email network. Proofpoint’s admin console is modern, providing granular controls and improved threat reporting. With Essentials, Proofpoint provides organizations with enterprise class email security at a cost effective price point. It’s an ideal solution for businesses and MSPs, with easy set-up, deployment, and competitive pricing. Proofpoint is also a good option for teams using Office 365, as it offers Azure Active Directory Sync, meaning deployment is seamless and new users are automatically added.
Abnormal Security
Abnormal Security is a cloud-based email platform that provides comprehensive protection against email threats, including business email compromise, phishing, malware, ransomware, and impersonation attempts. Abnormal uses machine learning technologies to create a baseline of your email environment, enabling threat protection systems to accurately detect and block malicious email content from being delivered to users. Abnormal Security was founded in 2018, and currently protects over 5% of Fortune 1000 companies, with a 100% renewal rate across enterprises with 5,000 – 500,000 employees.
The Abnormal platform uses behavioral AI to instantly detect malicious email content and block inbound and internal email threats. Abnormal also monitors and protects internal email accounts to identify and remediate compromised accounts. By understanding the known good across identity behavior, content, and tone, Abnormal can identify users that display unusual behaviors and remediate the accounts by logging users out of active sessions and requiring a password reset.
Abnormal is a powerful email security platform that has developed as a well-established, cloud-based alternative to email security gateway providers. Recognized as a ‘Microsoft Preferred Solution’ and selected by Microsoft for its email defense capabilities, the solution is deployed via API and can be launched across cloud email environments in minutes. The platform integrates natively with the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace platforms to provide enhanced protection, and a seamless user experience. For this reason, we’d highly recommend this service for organizations using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, looking for enhanced email security.
IRONSCALES
IRONSCALES provides fast, powerful protection against threats within the email inbox. They offer two paid packages (Email Protect™ and Complete Protect™), which provide anti-phishing protection combined with integrated security and awareness training, all of which are administered from a single console. IRONSCALES is a fully cloud-based platform, perfect for use with Office 365 and G Suite. Implementation can be completed in as few as two clicks and no MX record changes are ever needed. In testing, it detected phishing threats missed by Office 365 and other leading email security solutions. IRONSCALES provides powerful protection against sophisticated social engineering attacks, such as phishing and business email compromise.
IRONSCALES utilizes AI-driven security tools, combined with human intelligence from end-users, to identify malicious emails, and remove them from users’ inboxes automatically.
Additionally, IRONSCALES allows businesses to implement a ‘report phish’ button directly into end-user email clients. This works on all devices and is fully customizable. It allows users to report suspicious emails, which reduces dwell time. According to admin policy, when an end-user reports an email, a warning will display to other users who receive the same or similar email, or alternatively, the email will be quarantined. IRONSCALES also provides a full suite of security awareness training and phishing simulation, with customizable phishing templates and engaging training materials.
Customers praise IRONSCALES for making the management of phishing threats much easier on a broad scale. Admins report that in many cases, IRONSCALES has allowed them to remove phishing emails from inboxes with ease, stopping attacks before they happen. Customers also praise the ease of deployment. IRONSCALES integrates very well with cloud-based email providers, such as Office 365 and G-Suite. IRONSCALES is a great option for organizations that are happy with their level of spam filtering but need additional protection from advanced email threats, such as phishing, insider threats, and business email compromise. IRONSCALES also now offers protection against malicious links and attachments in Microsoft Teams environments.
Mimecast Secure Email Gateway
One of the most fully featured Email Secure Gateways on the market is Mimecast. It’s targeted primarily at enterprise users, with a high level of threat protection and granular admin policies on offer. The Mimecast platform is powerful and customizable. Mimecast provides a strong protection against email threats and admins can fine-tune the service to suit your specific needs. Mimecast offers Impersonation Protection to help prevent phishing attacks. Mimecast also offers features like Attachment and URL protection. These work in real time, stopping threats from infecting your network.
Mimecast is one of the leading vendors in terms of threat research. They monitor billions of emails and have a large threat database. This is good for customers because it means that they are always up to date on the latest threats and are ready to protect your organization against them. Customers praise the reports and analytics offered by Mimecast. They are easy to understand, allowing you to monitor how secure your emails are and how well Mimecast is performing. Mimecast boasts a low rate of legitimate emails being falsely marked as spam and a high rate of spam and virus blocking. Mimecast is a good option for enterprise organizations, looking for the most powerful protection for their emails.
You can read our full review of the Mimecast Secure Email Gateway here.
You can read our comparison of Mimecast with Proofpoint here.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a cloud-based email filtering service that works natively with Office 365, as you would expect from a Microsoft service. It helps to protect organizations against unknown malware and viruses by including anti-virus and URL scanning to block malware and harmful links, in real time.
Microsoft Defender provides a range of features including enforcing anti-phishing policies, anti-malware protection across SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams and ensuring attachments are safe. It’s very easy to get up and running for customers on Office 365. As an additional service to provide greater protection for Office 365, Defender provides admins with threat protection policies, reports and investigation and response capabilities that businesses would not otherwise get with Office 365. Using Defender, admins can define threat-protection, view real time reports and use tools to investigate threats and where they are coming from. This is important functionality, which goes beyond security capabilities that businesses can achieve with Office 365.
However, despite these features Office 365’s functionality, especially in terms of spam filtering, admin features and phishing protection, is not as developed as the other third party solutions that we cover on this list. Microsoft Defender is a popular choice with customers, as a comprehensive solution, that works directly with Office 365.
You can read Expert Insights’ full review of Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection here.
Avanan
Avanan is an innovative cloud-based email security solution, with a full threat protection suite for Office 365 and Google Workspace (formerly GSuite). Avanan’s platform protects businesses from sophisticated email attacks like phishing, malware, account compromise and data loss. Unlike traditional secure email gateway solutions, Avanan sits inside the email environment, and is deployed in just a few minutes, without requiring any MX record changes. This API based integration allows Avanan to analyze all historical emails, enabling it to accurately detect user impersonation and email fraud.
Avanan provides multi-layered threat protection to protect emails inside the email inbox. As Avanan sits within the email environment, it can secure inbound, outbound and internal emails. Avanan uses machine learning to identify zero-day phishing attacks, using over 300 indicators of compromise – including time of sending, location and domain – to flag suspicious emails. Avanan also uses machine leaning algorithms to detect business email compromise, by flagging logins across multiple countries and alerting admins to unusual behaviours that point to accounts being taken over.
Avanan also provides enhanced malware protection for emails. This includes protection against harmful attachments and URLs, with advanced reporting for all inbound, outbound and internal emails. From inside the email network, Avanan provides real-time and historical visibility into all users and email threats. Avanan is a strong solution for Office 365 and Google Workspace users looking for powerful protection against phishing, spear-phishing and account compromise.
Read verified user reviews of Avanan here.
Trustifi Email Security
Trustifi is an email security and encryption provider that helps organizations to secure their inbound and outbound email communications against email threats such as phishing, account takeover and email-delivered malware. Trustifi combines advanced inbound threat protection that scans emails for malicious content, with outbound email encryption that ensures the protection of sensitive data at rest, in storage and in transit. Compatible with local email clients, Office 365 Outlook and Google Workspace, Trustifi helps organizations secure their inboxes and stay compliant, no matter which platform they’re using to communicate.
Trustifi’s inbound email security technology scans all email communications for malicious content such as spam, viruses, malware and phishing attempts. The platform ranks each email according to its threat level and threat type, ranging from “Authenticated” through to warnings such as “Impersonation Attack”. The solution then quarantines or removes malicious emails as per admin-configured policies. Trustifi also offers address white- and blacklisting, to help organizations avoid repeat attacks from known malicious actors and ensure that known external senders’ emails aren’t mistakenly quarantined. In addition to its inbound security, Trustifi offers AES 256-bit encryption for all outbound emails, helping to ensure that all sensitive information is sent securely and in line with regulatory standards, such as HIPAA, GDPR and FINRA. To ensure maximum security, admins can require that recipients verify themselves with 2FA before they’re able to open an encrypted email – but they don’t have to set up their own account with Trustifi.
Trustifi’s solution deploys via API integration, so is quick and easy to set up. It comes with pre-configured, default settings in place so that, once deployed, it instantly provides threat protection. Admins can then log in to set up more granular inbound and outbound email security configurations. Trustifi is praised by customers for its ease of use, both from an admin and end user perspective, and we recommend it as a powerful, user-friendly solution for organizations of any size looking to secure their inboxes against threats such as phishing, as well as encrypt their most sensitive email content.
Read about the features and verified user reviews of Trustifi Inbound Shield.
Barracuda Essentials
Barracuda gives you a feature-rich email security system, without breaking the bank. Barracuda offers virus scanning and spam protection in real time. It’s easy to deploy with Office 365, making it a perfect option if you’re a small company looking to move your email network over to the cloud. Despite it’s cheap price Barracuda has packed lots of features into this platform. It offers advanced protection with URL scanning and outbound email filtering. These are paid additional features for many competitor services. With these features, it’s no surprise that the service is very popular with smaller businesses & MSP’s.
Barracuda Essentials is praised by customers for it’s support, with many users saying their team is quick to respond and knowledgeable. Being a global security vendor, Barracuda has a large threat intelligence division, constantly looking for new threats and developing measures to protect against them.
Barracuda Essentials offers a host of other services bundled with its email security. This includes an archiving solution, as well as encryption and backup. This range of features makes it easy to recommend this service to a smaller company or MSP looking for an all in one solution.
You can check out the full Expert Insights review of Barracuda Essentials here.
Cisco Cloud Email Security
Cisco have created a strong email secure gateway which offers strong defense against business email compromise and phishing attacks. Their research team looking at email threats is huge, ensuring you will always have access to cutting-edge threat protection. Cisco’s platform offers good protection against business email compromise and ransomware. This is due to a feature which automatically blocks links it deems to be unsafe, which protects you from emails even when they look genuine. This platform provides a range of admin features, which are customizable. The reporting and logging on offer are strong, bring you insights into your email security.
Cisco offers effective spam filtering, which will ensure you only get the emails you want in your inbox. The platform also features data loss protection, with methods which ensure your emails are protected with encryption.
One of the key benefits of this platform is that as a Cisco product, it’s easily integrated into their range of other security services. This means that your organization gets access to strong multi-layered protection. We’d highly recommend this service to larger organizations who can take advantage of this.
To find out more about Cisco Cloud Email Security read Expert Insights’ full review.
Libraesva ESG
Libraesva ESG is an integrated email security solution which uses multiple protective layers to protect Microsoft 365, Exchange, and Google Workspace, both at the gateway and API layers, so email threats like email fraud, BEC and phishing attacks are thwarted before they can even reach their intended targets.
This is a full-featured solutions offering users a range of useful capabilities. There is spoofing protection, which lets you identify and block imposters and prevent others from spoofing you by using a combination of SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication techniques, and threat remediation, which facilitated the removal of malicious emails from users’ inboxes, meaning emails are either deleted or stored for further analysis.
The threat analysis portal is an all-in-one dashboard providing enhanced visibility into email attacks and trend data for the organizations, benchmarked against Libraesva global data. The solution also prevents the delivery of malicious files via deep inspection and documentation sanitation, provides one-click protection which intelligently scans all links for evasive behavior to steep users away from unsafe websites, and encrypts emails end-to-end with the on-demand encryption engine. Email continuity prevents downtime from impacting productivity, and the available mobile app lets users manage Microsoft 365, Exchange, and Google Workspace even when away from their desks.
Libraesva ESG delivers advanced protection for cloud-based email platforms with complete protection against advanced threats and attacks and is easy to deploy, with granular configurability. The solution is well-suited to medium and large enterprises or educational clients interested in cost-effective email protection with high levels of visibility and customization.
What Is Email Security?
Email security solutions prevent malicious emails from being delivered to, circulating within or being sent from your email network. Email security is a broad umbrella term, which can be used to refer to multiple technologies, software solutions and frameworks designed to protect email networks.
It is important for all organizations to have an effective email security framework in place to protect users, customers and partners from sophisticated email threats such as spam, malware, phishing and business email compromise. Email security is also important to ensure and demonstrate compliance with data security regulations.
What Are Email Security Gateways And What Are The Key Features?
Email security gateways are designed to act as a shield for your email network, blocking inbound malicious email content from reaching user inboxes, and preventing outbound malicious email content from being sent.
Many email security gateways use a mixture of email content scanning, domain reputation scanning, URL scanning and attachment sandboxing tools to make a deterministic assessment of an incoming email message. If the message is deemed malicious, it is blocked; if it is deemed safe, it is delivered.
Admins should have the ability to configure policies which govern how this filtering works. They may wish to block emails from certain domains or allow emails from known safe senders. In addition, email security gateways should provide detailed reporting to help organizations track incoming email threats.
What Is Cloud Email Security?
Modern email security gateways are often entirely cloud-based but can also be deployed on-premises or as hybrid solutions. Deployment should be straightforward, especially with cloud-based email systems such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
This list also includes cloud-based email security solutions, that are not traditional gateways, but sit in a category Gartner terms “Cloud Email Security Supplements” (CESS). These vendors are often fully cloud native, and integrate with O365 and Google via API integrations, with no changes required to MX records.
The benefit of these solutions is that they can provide greater protection inside the email network than SEGs, which typically provide enhanced protection to the email network at its border. This means cloud email security solutions can more effectively spot signs of phishing and account compromise.
Our recommendation is that businesses needing strong email security should consider implementing multi-layered email protection, pairing a gateway with some form of inbox-based email security solution.