For some email users spam is a simply a nuisance – they clean out their inbox and go about their business. Larger organizations, however, can’t be so blasé about it all. Spam is a huge drain on productivity, taxes precious computing and network resources, and represents a huge security threat as well!

Kiss spam goodbye – and save your email server

Food packaging machine manufacturer Raque Food Systems was not having an easy time with spam. The company quickly realized that they had to do something about it before it was too late.

The company opted for GFI MailEssentials, a multi-faceted messaging security tool that stops over 99% of spam messages with no false positives, kills viruses and malware with the use of up to five leading antivirus engines, and can filter and monitor email content.

For Raque’s IT pro Larry Fields, the crucial element of GFI MailEssentials is antispam.

“We couldn’t get by without GFI,” Mr. Fields said. Raque has some 60 mailboxes and gets about 3,500 pieces of mail every day. Of those, 93% are spam. On the weekends, the rate of spam is 99%.

“Are you beginning to get the picture? It would overload our Exchange Server completely.”

Raque has been a GFI customer for well over a decade, and the spam problem has long been addressed. Years of spam hitting the network has also given Mr. Fields deep insight into different types of spam so these can be analyzed for security.

“(GFI MailEssentials) sends me a report of everything that was spam filtered, and it is configurable so I can save anything that is spam filtered as an EML file – just a folder on another server. I can then forward it to the proper recipient. This also means the spam is not sitting on and burdening the Exchange server.”

Since some of Raque’s customers have been through mergers, it isn’t always clear which emails are legit and which aren’t. And because Mr. Fields “has the spam filter packed about as tight as humanly possible” there are legit emails that are sometimes caught by the filter. GFI MailEssentials and Mr. Fields have a way around this. End users get copies of their spam reports and can alert him when certain email addressses should be added to the whitelist the address and pass along that mail.

Less spam also means more productivity. “The whole purpose of email is to expedite business flow. If users sit there with over 100 pieces of spam each day – that's a lot of wasted time. We do custom design and we have to pay our engineers. Can you imagine how much lost time that is to go through 150 pieces of spam before getting down to business?” Mr. Fields asked. Email consultancy Ferris Research calculated that if an end user gets only five spam emails a day and spends just a half a minute with each, that is a waste of 15 hours every year. With Raque’s volumes, that could be a waste of over 300 hours a year for each highly paid engineer.

The spam security threat

Spam is more than a bother – it is a major security risk. Experts say that more than 7% of spam messages harbor malware. Since Raque gets some 3,000 spams per day, that’s 210 malware-laded messages a day. Many spams are phishing attacks, which exposes end users and the organization to data breaches, theft and the release of confidential data.

GFI MailEssentials fights far more than spam. It can also be equipped with up to five antivirus engines to battle all that malware spam brings along. For Raque, this is an additional layer of malware protection as the company also uses Symantec Protection Dashboard. “You added antivirus protection which is a huge plus. You can never have too much protection,” Mr. Fields noted.

The GFI experience

Raque didn’t just pick the first spam solution it ran across.

“I looked at Barracuda and cloud solutions. None of them came close. There isn’t even a close second,” Mr. Fields said. “This is the best solution for our problem – not necessarily the best for everybody. But for anybody who falls in the same category with the amount of spam they get – and have to run their filters very tightly and be able to capture things in their spam filter that shouldn't have been, there's not a better product on the market for the money.” And Raque didn’t just pick a product – it picked a partner. “Your tech support techs are superb. Tech support is absolutely great.”

Disclaimer: All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. To the best of our knowledge, all details were correct at the time of publishing; this information is subject to change without notice.