PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway Eliminates Spam and Increases GKSS Employee Productivity

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“The amount of time to learn, understand and control PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway is negligible when compared to the productivity gain ... the annual time and cost saving would impress anyone." "No additional tuning has been needed and we still maintain the same high rate of accuracy. The only time I spend on spam is reviewing and implementing the new filters provided by Process Software," said Raksts.

Werner Raksts
System Administrator
GKSS Research Centre GmbH

Background
GKSS was founded in 1956 and is one of fifteen national research facilities that belong to the HGF (Hermann von Helmholtz Society of German Research Centres). GKSS mission is to make lasting contributions toward shaping the future of our industrial society by means of research and development work in the natural sciences and technology. They work closely with other cross-disciplinary and cross-border business-supported scientific facilities and public institutions.

Spam is Causing Productivity Issues
Werner Raksts, one of the System Administrators of GKSS Research Centre GmbH, found that spam was impacting his organization’s productivity. “Spam is a waste of employees’ time. The amount of time they spend reviewing and deleting spam email could be better spent in other ways, and can make a person ‘blind’ to their legitimate mail. People become tired of reviewing spam email, making it easier to accidentally delete legitimate email thinking it was spam. This became a serious issue for us, as the spam issue grew to 46% out of 22,000 messages per day,” said Raksts.

“We began to look for an anti-spam solution that was not only accurate, but required minimal system administration intervention, good support, and would run on our existing hardware. I also found it to be very important to test each and every new filter written by the anti-spam vendor so I can decide whether to deploy the new rule. Vendors that only offer live automatic updates of filters to my email server do not provide me with enough control or protection over my email infrastructure. Also, German law states that we cannot deny email addressed to any employee, so the anti-spam solution could not delay or delete messages even if it is clearly spam. Messages can only be cleaned for viruses,” added Raksts.

The Solution
As a long-time customer via Process Software’s German distribution partner IDE, Raksts decided to evaluate PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway. Raksts said, “I found the installation process quick and easy. It took me less time to get PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway up and running than it did to read the installation manual, which is concise and informative.” PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway was installed on two Alpha Workstations, the same systems as the Process Software’s PMDF MTAs so that no additional investment in hardware was required. Adding PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway did not significantly impact the performance of their existing systems. Raksts added, “I found it beneficial to use our existing systems because there is a good amount of protection already built to the system itself and there are some system tuning options that I used to increase throughput.”

In addition to PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway’s pre-defined heuristic filters, Raksts used its Bayesian artificial intelligence engine to identify spam. Raksts also wrote an additional 12 rules to address his site-specific email filtering requirements. “I am very pleased with PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway performance and found it to be at least 97% accurate at identifying the spam in our environment. After six months of uptime, no additional tuning has been needed and we still maintain the same high rate of accuracy. The only time I spend on spam is reviewing and implementing the new filters provided by Process Software,” said Raksts.

Because German law dictates that no one can be denied their email even if it is spam, Raksts decided to tag suspected spam email. He did this by configuring the PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway to modify the subject line to include the spam score and notification. Each user can set-up their email client to filter these messages into a different folder. “This is a good solution for us because there is no loss of legitimate email and users can easily see what was marked as spam,” said Raksts.

The Results
“The amount of time to learn, understand and control PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway is negligible when compared to the productivity gain. If you assume that if users took up to two minutes each to review and delete the 10,120 spam messages we receive per day, the annual time and cost saving would impress anyone,” said Raksts.

The feedback from the employees was good. Raksts added, “I knew the employees liked PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway when they would ask me why their service provider doesn’t use this solution for their private mailboxes.”

“In addition to the good support provided by Process Software and IDE, I have also found Process Software’s mailing list to be extremely helpful, as it consists of an active community of PreciseMail subscribers located all over the world.”