Google Bolsters E-mail SecurityGoogle Bolsters E-mail Security

On the heels of Micrsoft's bid for Yahoo, Google today rolled out new e-mail security, encryption and archiving services for corporate e-mail users of all sizes.The offerings -- Google Message Filtering, Google Message Security, and Google Message Discovery -- range in annual fees from $3 to $25 per user. Google Message Filtering provides spam and malware filtering; Google Message Security combines the latter service with enhanced virus protection, outbound processing to prevent data leaks and content policy management; and Google Message Discovery combines the previous two services with one year of searchable messaging archiving.

The services will be made available to users of Google Apps and to users of other e-mail systems, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell's Groupwise.

Google Apps has proved extremely popular among SMBs thanks, in big part, to its low cost. To address security and compliance concerns among its customers, last summer Google acquired message security services vendor Postini for $625 million.information