IBM has announced a free, open source software application aimed at improving the security and reliability of Unix-based e-mail communications.
IBM has released the source code of new software called Secure Mailer on the Internet. Secure Mailer, which will run on IBM's AIX Unix platform, can be used to send and store e-mail messages with a high level of security, said a spokesman at IBM's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters in Paris.
The software is a result of work done in IBM's AlphaWorks research group and is not a release from the company's software division, the spokesman said. Because it is an open-source application, it will be free to copy, use and modify at the users' discretion, he said.
Secure Mailer is meant to replace the Unix application sendmail, according to information on the AlphaWorks site (http://www.ibm.com/alphaworks/). Currently, 70% of all mail sent over the Internet is done so using sendmail, representing billions of messages per day, IBM said on the site.
While details of how the software will work are not yet available, the IBM spokesman said it is built as a series of separate components that work independently of each other. This way, the software can more easily secure the sending, receiving and archiving of individual e-mails.
Secure Mailer can be downloaded at http://www.ibm.com/alphaworks/.
IBM in Armonk, New York, can be reached on the World Wide Web at http://www.ibm.com/.