The Risks of Outbound Mail

Content-management techniques are also useful for countering the risks of outbound email. Outbound mail can pose a greater financial threat to your organization than the threats that inbound email poses. For example, unsolicited commercial email (UCE) can be an annoyance to delete, resulting not only in lost productivity but also in loss of proprietary business information. Files being sent out with email messages can cost you your competitive advantage.

One company uses content-management to make sure that CAD drawings don't leave the organization without prior approval and complete auditing of the source and destination. Key to this solution is the content-management product's ability to detect the binary file type; that is, to be sure that users can't fool the software by renaming files or placing them within a compressed archive such as a .zip file. The content-management product must be able to look inside the file properties header to determine the exact file type. The company also has a global policy that prevents password-protected .zip files from leaving the organization because the password acts as an encryption key that prevents an application from peeking inside the .zip file.