Image Manager is an add-on module for MAILsweeper for SMTP™ and works at the gateway to provide a policy-based content security and image analysis solution. Image Manager scans images attached to e-mails or embedded in e-mail attachments for inappropriate content such as nudity and pornography, according to your content security policy.

Why do I need Image Manager?

The circulation via e-mail amongst employees of nude and pornographic images is more commonplace than at first you might think. According to Wordtracker 2 , the phrase "sex" is the most commonly searched for term on the Internet.

Image Manager can help to combat content security threats by:

• protecting your organization from legal liability by detecting unacceptable images entering and leaving the network by e-mail
• identifying between acceptable and unacceptable images with skin and facial recognition technology
• protecting against e-mail network congestion with over-sized images
• reducing network resource misuse and improve employee productivity by discouraging image circulation by e-mail

Image Manager can enable an organization to protect their network and business integrity against e-mail Content Security threats.

Network Integrity Benefits

• keep network bandwidth available for legitimate business use
• provide a deterrent to the sending and receiving of unacceptable image files by e-mail
• manage undesirable image file types according to policy

Business Integrity Benefits

• protect against lawsuits associated with sexual harassment, breach of copyright and degeneration of the work environment
• avoid damage to corporate image and corporate brand through negative press
• protect investor relations

How It Works

Image Manager works in conjunction with the normal policies established within MAILsweeper for SMTP in order to provide a resilient, robust and reliable content security system.

Image Manager establishes the content of an image by processing the image data. It detects flesh tones, amount of flesh area and facial elements in an image, then compares this against a known database of features. Image Manager then categorizes the data as acceptable or unacceptable, and deals with it according to your policy, for example, deleting or quarantining the message, and/or sending an alert to the system administrator.

Following the MAILsweeper ‘Policy Manager’ approach, setting up a Image Manager image-based policy is a comprehensive, yet effortless task. An organization can apply their chosen image-based Content Security policies, and enforce these policies on in-bound and out-bound e-mail traffic. For example:

• define content-specific security operations with defined classifications (actions) such as delete, quarantine, forward, notify etc
• create policies at organization, department and individual levels
• set file attributes for file processing e.g. minimum and maximum file dimensions in pixels
• select the type of image files to analyze from GIF, JPEG, PNG,TIFF and BMP file types (although it does not depend on file extension when selecting files)
• enable image exception checking
• enable face detection (if face detector license has been purchased)
• apply a different policy to each image type
• select a high, medium or low confidence level to categorize an image as unacceptable

System Requirements

• Processor and speed: dependent on number of users and configuration, but minimum recommendation Pentium III running at 600Mhz or above.
• 1GB of free disk space and 192MB of RAM minimum or 256MB recommended
• MAILsweeper for SMTP 4.1_6 minimum installed on an NTFS file partition
• Windows NT 4.0 service pack 5
• Internet Explorer 4.01 service pack 1
• Microsoft Management Console 1.1
• TCP/IP networking

MIMEsweeper and Image Manager are trademarks of Clearswift Technologies Inc.