Deploy inline
With an Inline deployment for your Email Security (formerly Area 1) setup, Email Security evaluates email messages before they reach a user's inbox.
More technically, 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.
![With inline deployment, messages travel through Email Security's email filter before reaching your users.](/_astro/inline-deployment-diagram.BP5ZohFt_Z1ar6Rq.webp)
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.
- Email Security can modify delivered messages, adding subject or body mark-ups.
- 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 Email Security as your MX record, you will have to make changes to your DNS. If not — and you deploy 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).