Inline
With an Inline deployment for your Email Security (formerly Area 1) setup, Cloud Email Security evaluates email messages before they reach a user’s inbox.
More technically, Cloud Email Security becomes a hop in the SMTP processing chain and physically interacts with incoming email messages. Based on your policies, various messages are blocked before reaching the inbox.
When you choose an inline deployment, you get the following benefits:
- Messages are processed and physically blocked before delivery to a user’s mailbox.
- Your deployment is simpler, because any complex processing can happen downstream and without modification.
- Cloud Email Security can modify delivered messages, adding subject or body mark-ups.
- Cloud Email Security can offer high availability and adaptive message pooling.
- You can set up advanced handling downstream for non-quarantined messages with added
X-headers.
Inline deployments are not without their disadvantages. If you deploy Cloud Email Security as your MX record, you will have to make changes to your DNS. If not — and you deploy Cloud Email Security after your MX record — you will have a more complex SMTP architecture.
Additionally, this setup may require policy duplication on multiple solutions and the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).
For help getting started, refer to our setup guides.