As more regulation impacts small businesses, and as customers become aware of privacy issues, encrypted e-mail is becoming more and more valuable. But encryption is just one feature of this e-mail privacy solution.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 21, 2006]

Bellevue, Wash.-based Essential Security Software (ESS) is offering its Essential Taceo secure e-mail product to ISPs on a revenue share basis. The company announced an ISP customer, Houston, Tex.-based Net Star Telecommunications.

Net Star is offering Taceo to businesses of all sizes at a price of $6.95 per user per month. The software allows senders to encrypt e-mail and to restrict its use upon reception. Senders can restrict forwarding, printing, and saving of the e-mail, and the permissions can expire completely after a fixed period of time.

"Taceo provides a value proposition to small business customers that has been very difficult to achieve," explains Ray Zambroski, president and CEO of Esssential Security. "The technology that enables rights management of e-mail has been around and available to large businesses for some time, but it has been very expensive. We have seen vendors sell a solution that includes client software, plus server hardware, plus server software, at a price of $40,000 and up per location."

Taceo's infrastructure (see diagram at right) is peer to peer. The e-mail is delivered, encrypted, and the recipient logs into an ESS server to get the encryption key. Thus, ESS does not store or cache the content at all, and neither does the ISP.

ESS is avidly avoiding content-related controversies and expects that ISPs want to avoid them too. For example, while ESS can encrypt over 30 document types, it is avoiding the encryption of rich media like MPEGs and .avi files.

As easy as Outlook
No separate software is needed. Taceo operates as a Microsoft Outlook plug-in (Windows 2000 or XP required). It adds a secure e-mail and rights management unction to Outlook but does not otherwise change the e-mail client's operation, Zambroski assures us. That makes it quite easy to roll out, compared to a client-server based product.

The sender clicks on a "Send Secure" icon, picks a user restriction from the drop down menu or creates a detailed restriction from a wizard, and sends the e-mail. A user can create groups of users to allow, for example, a lawyer and an accountant to look at an e-mail.

Taceo also has a .ecc document format available that allows users to send files without metadata (for more about how metadata can embarrass companies, see the lawyers' take on this issue in Mining the Value from Metadata).

Pricing and availability
Taceo is available now. A free version of Taceo is available from the company website. The free version works for 30 days, after which it limits encrypted e-mails to a size of 20 K.

ISPs can offer Taceo on a revenue share basis that depends in part on the ISP's marketing plan, the way tech support is apportioned between ESS and the ISP, and whether ESS needs to do any customization or branding work. ESS prefers to have its brand name appear on the product, and many ISPs who offer anti-spam and anti-virus services are comfortable labeling products as "powered by" the vendor.

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