PreciseMail Case Study: PRIDE Industries
PreciseMail Case Study: PRIDE Industries (PDF)
Download a PDF version of this document
PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway Helps PRIDE Industries Stay Ahead of Sophisticated Spammers
“After evaluating some commercial anti-spam solutions, PRIDE Industries selected PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway for both its robust features and fair price..”
PRIDE Industries, the nation's largest employer of people with disabilities, provides a variety of outsourcing solutions to meet the manufacturing and service needs of companies nationwide. They employ more than 4,300 individuals in 11 states, including more than 2,700 people with disabilities.
PRIDE Industries is a self-sufficient business with nearly $100 million in annual revenue, and have been ranked as the 3rd largest manufacturing and service company in the greater Sacramento region. Founded in 1966, PRIDE is headquartered in Roseville, California.
PRIDE Industries first became a Process Software customer in 2000 when they found that PMDF was a better solution for protecting their Internet email gateway than Exchange. PMDF was more secure than Exchange because it deleted viruses with an executable attached file before it infiltrated their mail environment.
"Since 2000, spam has grown exponentially at PRIDE Industries" said Bill MacAllister, Senior Programmer, PRIDE Industries. "At first, just using the delete key seemed to work fine. Then we used Sieve in PMDF to eliminate spam. However, spammers have become more sophisticated at circumventing a mail filter. For example Sieve cannot filter Base64 encoded spam messages or analyze attachments. I also used a homegrown solution until PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway was available. My homegrown solution had nowhere near the breadth of features available with PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway. For example, by implementing PreciseMail we added support for whitelists, blacklists, and message quarantining. Additionally PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway performed better than my rather mundane Perl script" said MacAllister.
“It saves system and network resources by stopping spam at the gateway with little overhead on our existing system.”
PRIDE Industries processes approximately 70,000 messages per week. Up to 50% of their total email is spam. MacAllister stated, "This not only adds overhead to the email system resources and the network, but the type of spam we were receiving crossed the line. We host domains for several of our customers and the pornographic spam was offensive. This is especially a problem in one of the school districts I manage."
After evaluating some commercial anti-spam solutions, PRIDE Industries selected PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway for both its robust features and fair price. "PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway is accurate at filtering spam. It stopped well over 90% of the spam out-of-the-box with the predefined filters that come with the software" said MacAllister. He added, "As a policy, we are aggressive at filtering spam and set the spam discard thresholds accordingly. However, there is a balancing act; what some people consider spam, others people may not. For example, some people may not want to receive certain email advertisements and other people will not consider the same advertisements to be spam and will want to receive them. This is why PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway's whitelist and email quarantining of suspected spam messages is important. Whitelists can be set-up by the email users or myself so that each person has a list of email addresses from which email will always be delivered to them. I also quarantined any message that is suspected to be spam. Users are sent an email summary of their quarantined messages daily. They can retrieve them as needed so there is less administration required on my part". Overall PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway saves our organization time by improving productivity since people do not have to manually review and delete spam. This equates to a time savings of at least 16 man-hours per day across the company. It saves system and network resources by stopping spam at the gateway with little overhead on our existing system."
“Overall PreciseMail AntiSpam Gateway saves our organization time by improving productivity since people do not have to manually review and delete spam”
MacAllister stated, "PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway provides me with a lot of useful information on my email environment. I know which rules are causing the spam to be filtered. I then have the flexibility to tune these rules by altering their weight. Also, I will remove the rules that are not triggering the spam filter. This ability to customize the spam filter to my environment will further improve PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway's accuracy and performance."