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World Conservation Union: The E-Mail Must go Through

"If the mail server stops, we start getting calls from Costa Rica and South Africa within ten minutes"

Back in 2003, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) based in Gland, Switzerland, began successfully defending against a mounting spam problem with the help of CGNET Services International, a trusted managed network services provider for nonprofits, IUCN relied on its provider's spam-filtering service to keep unwanted e-mail at bay. In an initial test, the solution which leveraged Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam filtered out 100,000 spam messages over a period of just two months. More importantly, 99 percent of spam was eliminated from the network.

The IUCN employs 1,000 staff working on some 500 projects and thousands of internationally-recognized scientists and experts from 180 countries who volunteer their time to six global commissions which encourage equitable use of natural resources and sustainable development. Those staff and volunteers as well as members from over 140 countries and 800 non-governmental organizations rely on e-mail to keep up-to-date on developments within the organization.

In addition, the organization has around 150 traveling and remote personnel working from narrowband connections in countries that offer only limited Internet access and often little security between a local ISP and the network at headquarters. Like their counterparts at corporate headquarters, e-mail is their lifeline to the rest of the organization.

"The one single mission-critical tool in this organization is e-mail," says Dan Hinckley, electronic communications coordinator at IUCN. "Our Web site could fall over for a day or two, and even our file and print services could fail; but if the mail server stops, we start getting calls from Costa Rica and South Africa within ten minutes. And you can imagine, with an organization like IUCN that spans the time zones, e-mail is the one tool everybody uses to keep up-to-date."

For IUCN's remote and traveling users, spam not only threatened their productivity but it also presented a number of security hazards, including exposure to spam-based viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other malicious code.

That's when IUCN turned to CGNET's Gatekeeper which combines spam detection at the network level with the usual content-based filtering to lighten the load of unsolicited e-mail messages on its traveling employees.

CGNET Gatekeeper combines the router-based spam detection which monitors e-mail headers and determines when messages are likely to be spam based on the volume of e-mail coming from a single IP address of Symantec's TurnTide AntiSpam Router with content-based spam filtering found in Symantec Brightmail.

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam uses more than 20 different filtering technologies to identify and catch spam, with a capture rate at 95 percent and an accuracy rate of 99.9999 percent. Support from Symantec's Probe Network and globally distributed Symantec Security Response infrastructure add further layers of defense.

The Symantec TurnTide AntiSpam Router works by preventing spam from getting into the corporate network. It identifies spam by its routing information, slowing and limiting the flow of mail from suspected spam domains and, in turn, discouraging further communication from spammers. Because the router does not filter or block messages, it also cannot delete or quarantine a legitimate message, which eliminates the risk of false positives.

The result is a noticeable improvement in spam control as the combined solution filters out 99 percent of unwanted messages. "As soon as the new combined system was in place, we saw a 50 percent drop in the [amount of spam] we received weekly," explains Hinckley. "For our remote users especially, this made a big difference in terms of productivity and security gains.

"It's the same for our IT staff," he continued. "This reduction in spam has also cut the amount of time we have to spend looking at logs, non-delivery receipts, and antivirus reports. What's more, we're also seeing reduced loads on our Microsoft Exchange server as more spam is routed out before reaching us, as well as on our backup system as there are fewer unwanted messages getting backed up automatically every night.

"Needless to say," Hinckley concludes, "we're very happy with our spam protection."

The Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam and TurnTide AntiSpam technologies are now available in new e-mail security appliances from Symantec, while CGNET continues to offer the combined technologies in a hosted solution for as little as $2 per user per month.