SECURITY IS A COMPLEX FIELD. Mailprotector fights back with simplicity.
For starters, the company focuses on just one aspect of security. “”Our only job is to protect email,”” says Matt Scully (pictured), the company’s channel chief since June. “”It’s not a small function of our overall product.””
It’s not a small challenge either. Phishing attacks, often laden with ransomware, were a massive and growing problem before the arrival of COVID-19, and they’ve only grown more prolific since. Indeed, Google reported in April that it was blocking 18 million coronavirus-themed malware and phishing messages a day on top of 240 million other spam mails. IBM, meanwhile, recorded a 6,000% increase in COVID-related spam between March 11 and May 8 this year.
All of that has Mailprotector adding partners in big numbers lately. “”We expect to grow maybe 30 to 40% by the end of the year,”” Scully says.
The simplicity of the vendor’s partner program is one reason why. Instead of the usual complex tiering system, Mailprotector only requires partners to do $250 a month of business with the company. Anyone who clears that bar gets a dedicated account rep for assistance with sales and product issues, and access to a partner success manager for help with questions about billing and other logistical matters.
Support as well as sales and technical training are available too, along with thought leadership material on security trends and a steady stream of security statistics to incorporate in sales and marketing efforts. “”We just keep a strong, strong eye on what’s going on out there in the market and make sure that our partners know about it,”” Scully says.
Hot-Selling Bracket
The simplest thing about Mailprotector, though, is arguably its hottest-selling product, Bracket. Introduced in 2017, the email encryption solution is designed to free users from hassles and headaches that make most such systems difficult to use, and therefore chronically underutilized.
For one thing, there are no apps or plug-ins to install and no accounts to set up. There are no passwords to remember either: To sign in, simply give the system your email address and then click the link it sends that address in response. Links are good one time only for 15 minutes max, so you needn’t worry about protecting them.
The simplest feature of all, though, is how you instruct the system to encrypt a message. Using any email application on any operating system, just enclose a new mail’s subject line in square brackets. “”It’s that easy,”” Scully says.
Version 3.0 of Bracket, released earlier this year, includes features designed to make using the product even easier. Previous releases, like many encryption solutions, required users to filter MX records through Mailprotector’s cloud. “”The problem with that is that a lot of MSPs are currently working with another email security provider,”” Scully observes. “”They don’t want to have a filter on top of a filter.”” A new standalone version of the product for Office 365 now requires no MX record changes.
Also new to the product is the ability to send as many as 25 attachments per message securely through the system via a user-specific landing page. “”If I’m an accountant and you want to send your sensitive information to me, you can just go to my auto signature and I’ll have the URL for my landing page there,”” Scully says. Attachments can be as big as 1GB each now, moreover, enabling Bracket to serve as a convenient tool for transferring files that exceed an email application’s message size limit.
Scully is personally committed to ensuring that any additional features built into Bracket, or to Mailprotector’s spam filtering, archiving, email hosting, and other products, reflect direct MSP input. “”We’re a very MSP-centric company,”” he says. “”The major part of my job is to make sure that there is MSP representation on everything that we do.””
