Coldfeet
Coldfeet

Intelligent email securityand human risk managementfor modern organizations

Coldfeet is a composable email security gateway that gives you full control over how threats are caught and how modern email standards are enforced — without giving up performance, visibility, or the mailboxes you already have.

Runs on your own infrastructure · No mailbox migration · Live in an afternoon

Live verdicts · last 24h

Blocked

1,284

Quarantined

376

Delivered

48,902

SPF · DKIM · DMARCpass
Domain age6 days
Intent — payment redirect0.97
Verdictquarantined

Protecting mail for security teams across the US

  • Northwind Health
  • Cascade Financial
  • Meridian Logistics
  • Harbor Point Schools
  • Stonebridge Legal
  • Cedar Valley Utilities

Self-hosted

Your infrastructure, your keys

SMTP

Ingestion is the mail path, not an API

<60s

Typical scan-to-verdict on a healthy node

One product

Gateway, archive, and hosted mailboxes

The problem

Email was built to flow, not to be safe

Monolithic secure email gateways force a compromise the day you buy them. You take the detection they happen to ship, the reporting they happen to expose, and the release workflow they happen to think you want — and you pay for the two-thirds of the suite you will never turn on.

Meanwhile the attacks that actually land are the ones that pass authentication cleanly. A supplier invoice from a real, warmed-up domain. A payroll change request with no link and no attachment. A OneDrive share that was benign at delivery and weaponized four hours later. A signature-shaped product does not see any of it.

The rigidity is the vulnerability. When a new technique appears, you should be able to add a check — not open a renewal conversation.

A real verdict trail

Cleared authentication. Blocked anyway.

  • SPF pass · DKIM pass · DMARC pass
  • Domain age — 6 days
  • Intent — payment redirection (0.97)
  • Reply-to mismatch — external
  • Verdict — quarantined
The approach

Composable email security, under your control

One high-performance core, and the engines around it are yours to choose. Instead of locking you in, Coldfeet lets you do four things a suite cannot.

Protect what matters

Stop spam, phishing, malware, and business email compromise at the edge. Catch compromised accounts on the way out, before a blocklist does it for you.

Integrate, do not replace

Sits in front of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or your own MTA. Keep the mailboxes, keep the addresses, keep the calendar invites already sent.

Control every decision

One policy engine defines what happens across every component, per tenant, with validate-before-apply so a bad rule never reaches production mail.

Adapt at speed

Add, swap, or retire an engine without rebuilding the stack. New technique on Monday, a check in front of it on Monday.

This is the point of composable email security — specific, adaptable, and yours to shape.

No compromise required.

Outcomes

What changes once it is in front of your mail

Not feature counts. The four things security and IT leaders tell us actually moved after the cutover.

A posture that fits your risk

Deploy the defenses your threat model calls for, tuned to your industry, rather than the vendor average. Stop settling for a profile built for someone else.

Scale without a forklift

Built to move billions of messages and to keep moving when a destination goes down. Horizontal egress nodes, a continuity spool, and per-recipient delivery status.

Investigations in minutes

Full message trace with the reason for every verdict, so answering "what happened to this email" stops being an afternoon and becomes one query.

Spend on protection, not shelfware

Pay for the capabilities you switch on. No bundled modules you will never configure, and no per-feature surcharge when a threat changes shape.

Capabilities

The components that put you in control

Detection, response, and governance for email — unified, multi-tenant, and built to run anywhere.

Multi-layer scanning

ClamAV, Rspamd, AI content analysis, URL reputation, and DLP run in parallel on every single message, so no one signal decides a verdict.

Outbound abuse prevention

Clustered rate limits, spam-ratio and bounce-rate signals per tenant and per user, so a compromised account is contained before a blocklist notices.

Time-of-click protection

Links are re-checked at the moment they are clicked, which catches the page that was harmless at delivery and hostile an hour later.

Policy engine

Flexible per-tenant rules with a fixture dry-run and validate-before-apply, so nothing reaches live mail untested.

Quarantine & release

End-user and admin quarantine with one-click release, block, and sender controls — plus a daily digest people actually read.

Phishing simulation & training

Run realistic campaigns, deliver the lesson at the moment someone clicks, and carry a per-user risk score that policy can act on.

Unified visibility

Threat trends, verdict mix, DMARC journey, and full message trace across every tenant in one live console.

Zero-trust access

SSO, enforced 2FA for admins, IP allow-lists, scoped API tokens, and a tamper-evident audit trail of every action.

Customer stories

What changed after the cutover

Three US organizations that replaced a gateway they had stopped trusting. Different sizes, the same complaint going in.

Regional health system · Columbus, OH · 14,000 mailboxes

A health system stops triaging its own inbox

Northwind was running a legacy gateway that quarantined aggressively and explained nothing, so every false positive became a ticket. Moving detection to parallel engines and giving clinicians a self-service release flow took the help desk out of the loop entirely — without loosening a single policy.

We did not just cut the ticket volume. We finally know why a message was held, and we can show a clinician the reason in one screen.

Director of Information Security, Northwind Health

94%

fewer phishing reports reaching the help desk

Northwind Health

Reviews

In the words of the teams running it

Verified customers, US-based, all of them running Coldfeet in front of production mail.

Coldfeet caught targeted BEC attempts our previous gateway waved through. The message trace alone cut our investigation time from hours to minutes.
Marcus ChenHead of Security, Meridian LogisticsDallas, TX
We evaluated four gateways. This was the only one where I could add a check for a technique we had just seen, test it against real traffic, and ship it the same afternoon.
Priya RaghavanDirector of Infrastructure, Cedar Valley UtilitiesBoise, ID
Running it on our own hardware was the reason procurement said yes. Our mail never leaves our racks, and the auditors got the tamper-evident log they had been asking about for two years.
Dana WhitfieldCISO, Stonebridge LegalChicago, IL
As an MSP the per-tenant branding and isolation sold it. Forty-one clients in one console, each of them seeing our name and nothing about each other.
Tomás HerreraFounder, Anvil Managed ITPhoenix, AZ
The phishing simulations plus the risk score changed the conversation with our board. We stopped reporting click rates and started reporting which departments were actually improving.
Rebecca OstranderVP of Risk, Cascade FinancialSeattle, WA
Cutover took an afternoon and no one filed a ticket about it. After the last migration we were apologizing for a week.
Alan BrodyIT Manager, Harbor Point SchoolsProvidence, RI
Human risk

The last layer is the person reading the message

Detection will never be perfect, so Coldfeet treats the recipient as part of the stack. Run realistic phishing simulations, deliver the teachable moment at the instant someone clicks, and keep a per-user risk score that your policy engine can actually act on — tighter link handling for the people who need it, and nothing extra for the people who do not.

Explore human risk
  • Campaign templates that look like the mail your staff really get
  • Training delivered at the moment of the click, not next quarter
  • Per-user risk score that policy can read
  • Department and manager rollups for the board pack
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

The five things every evaluation asks in the first call.

How is this different from what Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace already include?

Native filtering is a floor, not a ceiling: it is the same profile for every tenant on the platform, and you cannot add a check it does not offer. Coldfeet sits in front of it as a second, independent layer you control — your own engines, your own policy, your own retention — and its central policy engine complements the native controls rather than replacing them. Layered defense with two different vendors is also what most cyber-insurance questionnaires are actually asking about.

Can it handle a requirement that is specific to us?

That is the point of a composable architecture. Engines, policies, retention rules, and delivery routing are all configurable per tenant, and the policy engine is expressive enough to encode a rule that only makes sense in your industry. If you have a requirement you have been told is impossible, bring it to the demo — the answer is usually a policy, not a roadmap item.

How disruptive is the migration?

There is no mailbox migration. Coldfeet becomes the MX for your domains and relays to the mailboxes you already have, so addresses, clients, and calendar invites are untouched. Guided DNS verifies each record live before you cut over, and you can run a single low-volume domain through it first. Most installs are serving real mail the same afternoon.

Will it scale, and what happens when something downstream breaks?

Egress runs on horizontally scalable nodes and the platform is built to move billions of messages. When a destination stops accepting mail, the continuity spool holds the message and retries with backoff instead of bouncing it, and per-recipient delivery status tells you exactly what is queued and why. Queue depth, spool size, and node health are all alertable.

How does it help with GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2?

It is self-hosted, so residency is the host you run, not a region we sell. Encryption at rest is optional and off in the code default (fresh installs opt in). There is no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation in this product — what assessors get is the tamper-evident audit log, per-message trace, configurable retention, and eDiscovery export. HIPAA readiness is the same: the controls exist; a BAA is not something this software issues.

Ready for an email defense that actually fits?

Stop compromising. Bring your domains and your real traffic, and see what Coldfeet catches in thirty minutes.

  • Talk to engineers who run mail, not a sales script
  • See the platform against your own threat model
  • Get a straight answer on whether it is a fit