With more than 30,000 active email users at George Mason, the university was experiencing an influx of spam, phishing and virus emails, filling email inboxes to capacity. Some students emailed term papers to professors only to have them bounced back because the instructor's inbox was full with spam. The high volume of unwanted email also negatively impacted the university's network processing. These problems led George Mason's IT team to look for a centralized solution to stop bad email at the network perimeter-before it reached internal systems. After evaluating several products in a production environment, George Mason chose MailFrontier Gateway.
"It was critical to solve the problem of bad email, but I wanted to make sure the solution we selected was simple for both end users and IT to manage," said Tracy Holt, manager, enterprise messaging for George Mason University. "The MailFrontier implementation was easy -- we were up and running in only 30 minutes and have been running smoothly since. We have a wide range of email users with diverse email needs and preferences, so MailFrontier's friendly interface and user-level customization features have been great. Since implementing MailFrontier, our help desk is now handling happy end user calls from people pleased with the solution's ease-of-use and effectiveness in blocking spam and phishing."
Last year, unwanted email accounted for 60 percent of George Mason's 400,000 incoming email messages each day, and viruses were attached to about 15 percent of those emails. The high volume of bad email noticeably slowed the university's network performance and forced organization-wide emails to be sent out at night to ensure they reached users by morning. "We're still receiving 400,000 messages per day at the gateway, but our mail servers are only processing about 125,000 to 150,000 messages per day -- all the good email. As a result of the mail servers having much less load, we are no longer seeing the delays in mail delivery that were once very common," added Holt.
Pleased with the initial installation of MailFrontier Gateway, George Mason University later chose to add MailFrontier's anti-virus protection, including MailFrontier Time Zero Virus Technology? and the signature-based anti-virus engine technology. "The effectiveness of MailFrontier's anti-virus capabilities led us to consolidate our systems and eliminate six appliances that were scanning inbound mail for viruses. Previously, we had to manage each of the appliances separately, so administration of one instance of MailFrontier is much easier. In addition, MailFrontier has much more horsepower than the old anti-virus appliances and mail gets through much faster. MailFrontier also provides much better reporting, including how many viruses come through and what type," notes Holt.
