Tumbleweed Releases MailGate Appliance 3.0 to Deliver Comprehensive Inbound and Outbound Email Security; Powerful Dashboard Provides Single Point of Management and Visibility for All Email Security Functions and Servers.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Tumbleweed(R) Communications Corp. (Nasdaq:TMWD), a leading provider of email security, managed file transfer, and identity validation appliance and software products, today announced the release of MailGate Appliance 3.0, the latest version of Tumbleweed's award-winning email security solution. MailGate Appliance 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art protection from spam, viruses and other inbound content threats, while adding new network layer edge defenses and bi-directional content filtering and policy management, all delivered on new 64-bit appliance architecture. This added functionality moves the MailGate Appliance 3.0 well beyond a dedicated anti-spam point-product, to a comprehensive email security solution.

"The first and second generation point email security products are necessarily being replaced by integrated solutions," said Peter Christy, Principal Analyst of the Internet Research Group (IRG). "The competitive challenge for the industry is to move beyond feature set competition to comprehensive system offerings that address diverse customer requirements, are highly manageable and provide flexible hardware, software and operating system platform options."

Comprehensive Inbound Defense Blocks Spam, Viruses, and Dark Traffic

While spam, phishing, viruses, and spyware continue to represent a huge problem for enterprise email systems, a new type of threat has begun to gain visibility. "Dark Traffic" currently represents as much as 80% of all inbound email traffic, and is made up of spam precursors like directory harvest attacks (DHA), email denial of service (DoS) attacks, malformed SMTP packets, messages to non-existent recipient addresses, and other invalid email messages. Most email security solutions available today have no visibility to this kind of illicit traffic, which flies under the radar of traditional content-centric spam defenses. Identifying these kinds of messages requires a product that can intelligently analyze SMTP connections for bad behavior and invalid messages, and throttle the sources of this traffic.

MailGate 3.0 offers multiple modules to stop inbound email security threats:

--MailGate Antispam combines content analysis, reputation filters, artificial intelligence, and outbreak detection into an integrated, easy-to-manage anti-spam solution delivering 98%+ capture rates. It is backed by Tumbleweed's global Message Protection Lab, a team of threat engineers who continually track and analyze spam 24x7 - human review greatly improves accuracy.

--MailGate Antivirus protects organizations against viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware with integrated anti-virus engines from McAfee and Kaspersky.

--MailGate Edge uses real-time SMTP connection analysis to identify and throttle invalid Dark Traffic before it enters the network, reducing inbound email traffic by as much as 80%.

Next-Generation Policy Management and Content Filtering

In addition to protecting against evolving inbound threats, Tumbleweed MailGate 3.0 now offers integrated email policy management and content filtering, allowing organizations to address a number of email security challenges, including regulatory compliance and leakage of private or sensitive data. More and more, organizations are required to monitor and manage the content of email messages sent from their domain because of laws or industry regulation, including HIPAA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Sarbanes-Oxley, California SB 1386, and various international privacy laws. Organizations are also concerned about the large number of recently publicized customer data privacy breaches, as well as ensuring that intellectual property such as trade secrets, patent information, designs, and other proprietary information is not sent to unauthorized recipients.

Utilizing Tumbleweed's ten years of experience in managing email policy, MailGate 3.0 offers a next generation policy management and content filtering module to address outbound email security challenges:

--MailGate Policy Manager allows organizations to easily define and enforce custom policies based on the content of a message or the identity of the sender or recipient, and take actions to quarantine, return, drop, re-route, annotate, add disclaimers, modify headers, or tag messages. MailGate Policy Manager includes policy templates for HIPAA and GLBA policy violation monitoring, including a set of standard reports for compliance analysis and auditing.

"The management dashboard on MailGate 3.0 is fantastic," said Scott Rose, senior infrastructure architect at Finisar Corporation. "I get total visibility to all of my inbound and outbound email traffic, I can manage all my email security policies and message queues, and I can drill down and manage all four servers in my deployment from one place. We were frankly stunned to find that over 70% of our inbound email traffic was invalid -- our old anti-spam solution completely missed this."

64-bit Appliance Platform

Designed to provide comprehensive email security, MailGate Appliance uses Tumbleweed's new 64-bit appliance hardware based on AMD's Opteron CPU. This new appliance platform offers unsurpassed email performance, with the 1U version processing 375,000 messages per hour and the 2U version processing 500,000 messages per hour.

"Tumbleweed's intention has always been to lead the industry both in breadth and depth of solution offerings," said John Thielens, CTO of Tumbleweed. "The latest release of our MailGate Appliance gives our customers even more flexibility to build the best solution for their environment. The addition of content filtering and Edge Defense to our robust appliance version gives customers who want complete security in hardware form factor more options than ever before."

About MailGate 3.0

MailGate 3.0 offers comprehensive inbound and outbound email security, including:

--Antispam - protection from spam and phishing attacks

--Antivirus - protection from viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware

--Outbreak protection - zero hour protection from spam and virus outbreaks

--Network layer Edge defenses - protection from Dark Traffic, including Directory Harvest Attacks and email Denial-of-Service attacks

--Bi-directional content filtering - monitoring email traffic to identify data leakage and regulatory compliance violations

--Policy enforcement - a powerful, yet easy to use engine for delivering, re-routing, blocking, quarantining, archiving, or encrypting email messages based on corporate email policy

Scalable, flexible configuration:

--Support for multiple appliances for high volume processing and redundancy

--Transparent clustering with automated load balancing 

--Local directory-based authentication for end users

--Centralized end-user queues

--High performance hardware

Centralized management and reporting:

--Single management console 

--Consistent policy across appliances

--No need for additional, dedicated console 

--Integrated solution - no extra products to buy for quarantine management or reporting

Tumbleweed MailGate Appliance version 3.0 is available now. The MailGate Appliance can be used stand-alone, or in combination with other Tumbleweed email security products to provide complete, multi-tier email security, email message encryption, and gateway to gateway secure communications.

About the Tumbleweed MailGate Product Suite

The Tumbleweed MailGate Suite is a family of products for protecting, filtering and monitoring corporate email. These best-in-breed products enable businesses to manage inbound and outbound traffic, block threats, encrypt messages and optimize network performance. MailGate products include Email Firewall software, MailGate Appliance, Edge and Secure Messenger, each optimized for specific environments and security challenges.

--MailGate Email Firewall: A comprehensive email security offering, with functionality ranging from inbound threat prevention to outbound content filtering, monitoring and encryption.

--MailGate Appliance: A powerful and easy-to-deploy hardened Linux appliance, providing integrated network edge defense, antispam, antivirus, content filtering, policy management, and outbound encryption.

--MailGate Edge: A secure email relay appliance that delivers state-of-the-art network-based email defense against Directory Harvest (DHA) and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

--MailGate Secure Messenger: A policy-based, secure message delivery solution that inspects incoming and outgoing mail and dynamically applies user-defined encryption and routing preferences.

About Tumbleweed Communications Corp.

Tumbleweed provides security software and appliances for email protection, file transfers, and identity validation that allow organizations to safely conduct business over the Internet. Tumbleweed offers these solutions in three comprehensive product suites: MailGate, SecureTransport, and Validation Authority. MailGate provides protection against spam, viruses, and attacks, and enables policy-based message filtering, encryption, and routing. SecureTransport enables business to safely exchange large files and transactions without proprietary software. Validation Authority is the world-leading solution for determining the validity of digital certificates. Tumbleweed's enterprise and government customers include ABN Amro, Banc of America Securities, Catholic Healthcare West, JP Morgan Chase & Co., The Regence Group (Blue Cross/Blue Shield), St. Luke's Episcopal Healthcare System, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Defense, and all four branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. Tumbleweed was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif. For additional information about Tumbleweed go to www.tumbleweed.com or call 650-216-2000.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT

Tumbleweed cautions that forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on plans and expectations as of the date of the press release, and that a number of factors could cause the actual results to differ materially from the guidance given at this time. These factors are described in the Safe Harbor statement below.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, particularly with respect to the functionality and performance of Tumbleweed products. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "potential," "continue," "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," and similar expressions. For further cautions about the risks of investing in Tumbleweed, we refer you to the documents Tumbleweed files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly Tumbleweed's Form 10-K filed March 16, 2005 and Form 10-Q filed August 9, 2005.

Tumbleweed assumes no obligation to update information contained in this press release, which represents the Company's expectations only as of the date of this release and should not be viewed as a statement about the Company's expectations after such date. Although this release may remain available on the Company's website or elsewhere, its continued availability does not indicate that the Company is reaffirming or confirming any of the information contained herein.