Email Gateway Validation 

Email gateway validation is the practice of testing whether your secure email gateway (SEG) actually catches phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and malware, instead of assuming it does based on configuration or vendor claims. Cymulate does this by sending simulated malicious emails through your live mail flow and checking what happened at every stage: quarantined, flagged, delivered with a warning, or landed in the inbox untouched. The result is evidence of how your email gateway performs against current attacker tactics, not just its published detection rates. 

Cymulate sends simulated phishing, BEC, and malware emails through your actual mail path and correlates the outcome with alert and event data from your email gateway, showing whether it detected and acted on each technique and where alerting or filtering fell short. Because tests run against your live configuration and mail flow, results reflect your actual environment and policy setup, not a generic lab environment.

Cymulate simulates the full range of email-borne attack techniques, including phishing, spear phishing, business email compromise, and malware delivered through attachments or links across email and collaboration workloads. Simulations reproduce the delivery mechanism and behavior attackers use without carrying an actual malicious payload, so you can test detection and filtering effectiveness against realistic tactics without risking a real infection or compromise. 

Yes. Cymulate’s email simulations are production-safe: they use the same delivery techniques as real phishing and malware campaigns without executing actual malicious code or putting mailboxes, endpoints, or data at risk. That safety is what allows testing to run continuously against your live email gateway and mail flow, rather than being limited to a lab environment or a periodic campaign window.

When a simulated email reaches the inbox instead of being quarantined or blocked, Cymulate flags it as a bypass, showing exactly which technique got through and why the gateway’s policy or filtering missed it. Cymulate then provides prioritized, actionable tuning guidance — what policy, rule, or filtering setting to adjust — and lets teams retest the same scenario after the change to confirm the bypass is closed. Findings route to the right owners through Cymulate’s workflow and ticketing integrations, so a bypass becomes a tracked fix rather than a one-off alert.

Continuously, or at minimum weekly: phishing and BEC tactics change faster than the annual or quarterly cycle most organizations use for email gateway testing today. Cymulate’s threat library updates daily, so new attacker techniques and lures can be tested against your gateway as they emerge rather than waiting for the next scheduled review. Continuous validation also catches configuration drift, such as a policy change or rule update that quietly opens a bypass between test cycles.