What is message splintering?

Intelligent message splintering is the mechanism that allows for differing recipient-based content security rules to be applied independently to message with multiple recipients.

Each recipient is evaluated for each policy in the appropriate mail policy table (Incoming or Outgoing) in a top-down fashion.

Each policy that matches a message creates a new message with those recipients. This process is defined as message splintering:

• If some recipients match different policies, the recipients are grouped according to the policies they matched, the message is split into a number of messages equal to the number of policies that matched, and the recipients are set to each appropriate "splinter."

• If all recipients match the same policy, the message is not splintered. Conversely, a maximum splintering scenario would be one in which a single message is splintered for each message recipient.

• Each message splinter is then processed by anti-spam, anti-virus, Advanced Malware Protection (incoming messages only), DLP scanning (outgoing messages only), Outbreak Filters, and content filters independently in the email pipeline.