PreciseMail Case Study: Delta Telecom
PreciseMail Case Study: Delta Telecom (PDF)
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Delta Telecom Chooses PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway to Eliminate Spam and Provide Greater Subscriber Satisfaction
"The sophisticated multi-layered filtering technology offered in PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway eliminated over 90% of our spam problem out-of-the-box. It took me only 15 minutes to get it up and running, and I saw an immediate improvement in our mail server performance. The mail abuse team also reported that there were less complaints about spam."
Background
Delta Telecom, the first mobile telecoms operator in the Russian market, was established in Saint Petersburg in September 1991. They offer high quality voice services, high-speed (up to 2.4 Mbps) Internet access using mobile stations (cell phones), and ISP services covering a large territory including Saint Petersburg, most of the Leningrad, Novgorod and Pskov regions, as well as the Republic of Karelia. Delta Telecom is the largest mobile operator in Russia using an advanced CDMA-2000 network.
The Situation
Ruslan Laishev, Delta Telecom's system administrator, found that spam was flooding their mail servers and consuming their network. "We were processing 150,000 messages per day between our two mail servers, and around 80% of it was spam," said Laishev. He added, "If we didn't address our spam problem soon, Delta Telecom would need to invest in additional equipment to handle the mail load. In addition, our abuse team experienced a surge of complaints about spam from our subscribers. It was my responsibility to work with the abuse team to get this problem under control."
A spam filter was implemented to reduce their junk mail. However, Laishev found that over time the filter was unable to keep up with the large percentage of spam they were receiving. "The technology used in this spam filter was not sophisticated enough to stop the many diverse types of spam message content," said Laishev.
"I have now used PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway for the past few years. The Process Software development team has consistently updated the filters to stay ahead of all the latest spamming tricks."
The Solution
As a long-time customer of Process Software, Laishev decided to evaluate PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway. He deployed the PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway SMTP proxy server, which receives the email from the Internet, filters out spam, and then relays the filtered email to the destination email servers. Filtering email for spam before it is received by the email server reduces the email server's load and improves its performance.
Laishev decided to implement all of the filtering technology available in PreciseMail, which includes DNS blacklists, heuristic analysis, reputation filtering, Bayesian analysis, Verify Mail From (VMF), and allow and block lists. "The sophisticated multi-layered filtering technology offered in PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway eliminated over 90% of our spam problem out-of-the-box. It took me only 15 minutes to get it up and running, and I saw an immediate improvement in our mail server performance. The mail abuse team also reported that there were less complaints about spam," said Laishev.
The ability to tune and write rules was important to Laishev so that he can respond to special service requests. PreciseMail's web-based administrator interface provides the ability for customers to write spam filtering rules, create allow and block lists, and enable or disable the various spam filtering layers. Laishev said, "I have now used PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway for the past few years. The Process Software development team has consistently updated the filters to stay ahead of all the latest spamming tricks."