Hosting Success Story - Spam Filter
Mary C. | 15 May 2004 |
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Hosting Success Story
Merrill Lynch had a substantial spam problem that grew exponentially in 2003, when 30+% of 6 million messages per day were unsolicited junk email. The January 27 issue of USA Today predicted that Merrill Lynch’s loss in productivity due to the end user having to filter through unwanted email was equivalent to 4 full-time employees. Merrill Lynch considered several anti-spam vendors and chose Postini (the same vendor Blizzard uses for its clients). The financial management company reports that Postini has eliminated 90% of their junk mail, less than 1% of quarantined mail being filtered as a "false positive".
How bad is spam for the rest of the world? According to stats quoted by the article, spam soared 68% in 2003 from 2002 and is expected to jump another 10% to 8.5 billion daily spam messages in the next year. Our customers using Postini for their spam filter have seen a drastic decrease in the number of spam AND virus messages bombarding their computers.
Tom Corey with the Rock Eddy Bluff Country Bed & Breakfast had tried numerous products for filtering out spam and viruses before he signed up for the Postini filter. With the Postini service, email that he receives is now at a manageable level, freeing his time to run his B&B. During the week of April 26, 3,491 spam and 918 virus infected messages were quarantined from Tom’s email.
The Postini spam filter has been quite helpful to me. It has saved me time and even more importantly, frustration. With lots of email variations to my domain posted out on the web, I was getting several hundred spam emails daily, many of them duplicates. I estimate that the filter is now preventing upwards of 95% of those spam emails from reaching my inbox. I often forward the few spam that make it through the filter back to Postini so that they can design to catch similar spam in the future.
I really like the fact that I can customize the settings. For those “critical” emails, such as notifications of online reservations, I have set the filter so that those messages will always come through to me.
I no longer hate to open my email program. My blood pressure is returning to normal.
I really like the service!
Tom
The entire USA Today article can be viewed at:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-01-26-managetech_x.htm
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