Separating vital business information from spam without negatively impacting user productivity as well as backup and storage resources.
When ELO acquired the elo.com domain name, this unfortunately came with huge amounts of spam emails. ELO operates over 200 email boxes, some of them info@ or team email addresses. With an average month generating around 200,000 hits on the Exchange server, ELO realized action was necessary. Florian Rudd, IT Administrator for ELO Digital Office, explains further: “It was hard for our users to find their business-critical emails and it was a total drain on our infrastructure. As soon as an email enters our system it is automatically backed up in several locations and takes up expensive space, which is always at a premium. We had enormous amounts of spam going through our systems. It was negatively affecting user productivity, and we wanted to find a solution that would prevent spam from entering our Exchange server in the first place. When we researched it, we found that most anti-spam solutions are aimed at deleting spam from email boxes. That would not be suitable for our levels of spam.”
ELO Digital Office GmbH is one of the leading software manufacturers for document management systems (DMS) and enterprise content management (ECM) solutions in the German market.
ELO came across Micro Focus Secure Messaging Gateway which is purpose-built to provide high performance email scanning by threading scan processes asynchronously across all available resources on the server. Mr Rudd comments: “This was the only cost-effective solution we could find on the market. We love that it’s totally specialized around spam control. Our firewall also offers anti-spam features, but it’s really clear that it is not its primary market, and so it is not as effective as the Micro Focus solution.”
With Secure Messaging Gateway, messages are filtered at the perimeter of any standards-based mail or collaboration system. This includes ELO’s Exchange platform, but also Office 365, Gmail, GroupWise, Vibe, Lync, or Lotus Domino. Once Secure Messaging Gateway was implemented, Mr Rudd was astonished to discover the level of spam messages: “In an average month Secure Messaging Gateway identifies 85 percent of our Exchange server hits as spam and filters them before they enter the email system. In one month we had over a million hits on our Exchange server and Secure Messaging Gateway still blocked our spam effectively.”
To minimize false-positives (where emails are blocked or filtered when they should have been delivered), the Secure Messaging Gateway anti-spam engine is constantly updated with new spam signatures. This innovative technology assures that false-positives are detected and mail needed by ELO users ends up in their inbox while spam is filtered out. Secure Messaging Gateway also effectively blocks any virus spam, keeping the ELO email system safe from intrusion.
Secure Messaging Gateway slotted easily into the existing ELO virtual machine infrastructure as a simple software appliance, without the need for additional hardware.
ELO has been using Secure Messaging Gateway for over 10 years. Mr Rudd comments:
Florian Rudd – IT ADMINISTRATOR
ELO Digital Office GmbH
Secure Messaging Gateway has helped increase productivity as ELO email users don’t need to spend time and effort sifting through hundreds of emails each day. The IT administration is straightforward and valuable backup and storage resource is now only used for legitimate business communications.
Mr Rudd concludes:
Florian Rudd – IT ADMINISTRATOR
ELO Digital Office GmbH
