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SonicWall on Monday announced a new version of its e-mail security software that runs on Windows servers or the company's own appliances.

Many of the new features in Email Security 6.0 software, available now, are tuned for SonicWall's high-end Email Security 6000 and Email Security 8000 appliances, which are designed for companies with more than 100,000 users and can process more than 100 million messages per day, according to company officials. However, Email Security 6.0 will run on all of SonicWall's e-mail security appliances.

These new features include a "data chunking" system that increases security updates to every five minutes so that customers get faster protection from developing threats; new image-spam and stock-ticker spam detection; new reporting capabilities such as real-time stats on e-mail throughput and CPU usage; and a revamped user interface that the company is releasing across its systems, officials say.

Email Security 6.0 protects corporations against spam, viruses, phishing attacks, and other threats while also preventing sensitive or regulated information from leaving an organization, officials say.

SonicWall's 6000 and 8000 appliances achieve high performance by processing e-mail messages in memory before they are written to disk, therefore cutting down on handling time. The appliances and the software can be deployed in redundant configurations but still be centrally managed regarding quarantined messages, LDAP-based user management, and reporting, officials say.

Pricing for the Email Security 6.0 software depends on the number of users. For example, an organization with fewer than 5,000 users would pay US$15,995 for the 6000 appliance and $14,995 for Version 6.0 to run on it, while companies with more than 5,000 users would pay $25,995 for the 8000 appliance and $22,995 for Version 6.0 to run on it.

Earlier this month SonicWall announced plans to purchase Aventail for $25 million. Last year, the company bought e-mail security software maker MailFrontier.