When it comes to communicating with employees, business associates and others, e-mail is indispensable. But, sending confidential or sensitive information over the Internet has its pitfalls.

For example, what happens if you send a confidential e-mail to a recipient, who subsequently leaves the company? What happens to your e-mail? Is it sent to a competitor, for example? Or suppose you make a mistake, and send a message to the wrong person. Or your recipient elects to forward your message against your wishes. In each case, you’ve lost control of the information.

Secure Mail is a software application that lets you retain complete control of e-mail messages – and even recall them – after you hit the ‘Send’ button. Quite simply, you can encrypt your e-mail messages and attachments - with explicit restrictions on how recipients can use the information.

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Secure Mail offers:

• Dynamic control of e-mail: You decide who can read your message, when they can read it and whether recipients can print, copy or forward the message. If you decide to recall your message, all copies, no matter where they are located – on PCs, servers, or backup tapes -- are automatically expired. Best of all, you can change these parameters on the fly, even after your message has been opened by your recipient.
• Protection for e-mail attachments: Secure Mail can encrypt both messages and attachments so you can confidently e-mail documents that previously would have been deemed too sensitive to send over the Internet.
• Ease of use: Secure Mail integrates seamlessly with popular e-mail applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Qualcomm Eudora to provide a familiar and intuitive user interface. You can protect, control, track and recall messages with a few mouse clicks.
• Easy access for recipients: Secure Mail’s Guest Access feature makes it easy for recipients to read your protected messages – even if they’re not registered on the Recall server. In this mode, copy, print, and message expiration are still enforced.
• Tracking of message activity: See exactly what recipients do with your messages including when and how often they read or print them. All messaging activity can be tracked through its entire lifecycle.

How It Works

Authentica's advanced client/server technology allows Secure Mail to be easily deployed and managed within any size organization. Secure Mail consists of distributed Secure Mail plug-ins and a Recall Server.

Secure Mail Client Plug-in
The Secure Mail plug-in is a small application that integrates seamlessly with popular e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Qualcomm’s Eudora. The plug-in allows users to encrypt and decrypt messages, manage e-mail policies and track message activity.

Secure Mail MIMEsweeper Plug-in
This plug in integrates directly into the MIMEsweeper Mailsweeper SMTP product allowing corporate key policies to be set for documents without the user needing to set them.

Recall Server
The Recall Server is the central engine that manages all Secure Mail policy activity including keys, client connections, information access policies, authentication, authorization and event logging. Central policies allow for expiration time limits, user group privileges, and authentication requirements. The delegated administrator(s) can control corporate-wide policies that individual authors cannot override.

The Process

The process for sending and receiving Secure Mail-protected messages is a seamless one.

Sender
First, the sender composes a Secure Mail message like a typical e-mail.

Either the sender then encrypts the message by clicking on a Secure Mail icon located in the e-mail toolbar on the client or the message is intercepted by MIMEsweeper and the Secure Mail policy invoked.. 

This action automatically assigns an e-mail policy to the message. A policy establishes who can read the message and when, whether recipients can print or copy the message and a date and time that the message expires. Users can establish a default policy that is applied to all outgoing messages or establish policies on a per-message basis. Policies can be changed at any time, even after a message has been delivered.

When the message is sent, the e-mail is automatically encrypted and a decryption key is registered with the Recall Server along with the associated message policy. (The server stores the keys for decrypting the message but does not store the message itself.)

Recipient
When the recipient attempts to open the Secure Mail message, he is prompted to log in to the Recall server. Once connected, the Recall server provides a key that allows the message to be opened.

Copyright Authentica Inc.