MailMarshal SMTP
Image Analyzer

Image Analyzer from Marshal is a specialized image scanning and classification solution. It is designed to automatically scan and sort images entering your organization via email into either an ‘offensive and pornographic’ category or a ‘normal and acceptable’ category.

The Business Issue

Email is an essential business tool – vital for communication and sharing information. However, it is also a vulnerable entry point for a range of security threats such as spam, viruses, denial of service attacks and inappropriate and illegal content. MailMarshal is Marshal’s award-winning solution to these threats; securing your organization against external risks, allowing you to protect your business against offensive and illegal content and helping you fulfi ll your compliance obligations. It has been reported that 8 out of 10 Fortune 500 companies have dismissed staff for misusing company Internet and email resources. Twenty-five percent of businesses in the United Kingdom have dismissed staff for Internet misuse and more than two-thirds of cases involved pornography. Even police and law enforcement agencies in some countries have had to fi re staff for inappropriately sharing pornographic content. This is a problem for every business, educational institution and public service organization.

With MailMarshal, you can manage employee access to more than 175 file types including video, audio, documents, executables, archives and images. If you allow employees to send and receive image file types via email you are relying on blind faith that images are appropriate and business-oriented. Now, with MailMarshal and Image Analyzer you can classify image content as potentially pornographic or offensive.

The Solution

The Image Analyzer tool uses cutting edge image analysis technologies to reliably classify pornographic and offensive content. These technologies search for facial characteristics and other body areas as part of the deep scan process to determine whether an image should be identifi ed as pornographic or not. Image Analyzer is a fast, multi-threaded solution that can process and classify multiple images almost simultaneously. This means that images can be analyzed and managed in realtime with no discernable delay in email performance. Image Analyzer integrates with MailMarshal as an add-on module, much like an anti-virus solution, and allows you to defi ne any subsequent action that your organization feels is appropriate or needs to undertake for legal reasons. For example, with MailMarshal and Image Analyzer integrated together, you can:

• Log when images are detected as pornographic for reporting purposes.

• Block potentially pornographic images, delete them or (if the images are illegal) quarantine them so that they can be passed on to the appropriate authorities.

• Strip potentially pornographic images from emails and allow the message body to pass to the recipient.

• Quarantine pornographic images in special folders that end users can access, allowing users to release legitimate emails to themselves – but log these actions for reporting purposes.

• Block pornographic images and notify the sender of your policies on pornographic content.Image Analyzer provides you with reliable intelligence on what kinds of image content your organization sends and receives via email.

The Benefits of Image Analyzer

The powerful combination of MailMarshal 2006 and Image Analyzer provides you with many important benefits:

• Robust solution to protect your employees, customers and suppliers from inappropriate and potentially offensive or illegal images, satisfying your legal obligations both to those working inside your organisation and those having contact with it from the outside. This can help avoid embarrassing and unfortunate incidents and prevent staff departures or staff-based legal actions based on exposure to offensive content.

• Reliable insight into how your email system is being used. How much pornography does your organization receive? Who is sending or receiving pornographic content within your organization? Who is fl ounting your Acceptable Use Policies and abusing their email privileges? This information can help you to improve your AUP, identify problem employees and manage potential issues before they escalate into more serious matters or the need to dismiss normally responsible and valued staff.

• Reduce and avoid legal exposure. By deploying Image Analyzer you can demonstrate a serious and consistent effort to enforce your Acceptable Use Policies and prevent employees or customers being exposed to pornographic images.

• Legal compliance. A complex network of laws exist which intersect management of inappropriate or illegal images which may enter your IT infrastructure. Image Analyzer is one of the primary tools that can be used to ensure compliance and avoid legal exposure.

• Productivity improvement through removal of offensive distractions.

• Brand equity and reputation management. Minimize the risk of offending important business partners or customers through the transmission of pornography.

Key Features

• Comprehensive, multi-faceted image analysis provides reliable and accurate results.

• Sophisticated, proprietary body and facial recognition algorithms.

• Fast, multi-threaded scanning resulting in real-time classifi cation with no email delivery interruption.

• Complete integration with MailMarshal providing powerful policy options, including reporting and end-user quarantine release.

System Requirements

Hardware

• Processor - Pentium 4
• Disk Space - 10GB HDD (NTFS) or higher
• Memory - 512MB RAM or higher
  

Software

• Operating System - Windows 2000/XP/2003
  
  Database – MSDE 2000 SP3a or later, SQL 2005 Express, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3a or later, or SQL Server 2005

• MailMarshal – MailMarshal SMTP 2006 (6.1.6.x) or later

• Optional – Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 or later for Web Tools

• ASP .NET 1.1. ASP .NET is part of the .NET Framework 1.1

 

Marshal ImageAnalyzer Datasheet