LeTourneau University's “in-house solution” brings Spam solution “in-house”

Ethan Cooper, Network Administrator at Texas' LeTourneau University, could truly be defined as an in-house solution. “I graduated from here on a Friday and started working here the following Monday,” recalls Cooper. Of the many problems Cooper and his team had to deal with on a daily basis, Spam was one of the most prevalent. Since the day he started, one of his constant challenges has been spammers trying to sneak past email filtering solutions to reach LeTourneau's 4,000 students. Cooper explains, “We had been having success with SpamAssassin and Roaring Penguin's MIMEDefang, but were still having daily complaints about spam, even when it was filtered to junk mail folders.” Users at LeTourneau were becoming frustrated with spam outbreaks and Ethan's team often lost half a day per week dealing with spam problems. “It finally got to the point where we had to block all emails containing ZIP files due to spam carrying virus infections”, continues Ethan.

Small Team, BIG Results

Fielding complaints almost daily Ethan and his team knew that they needed a solution. “We were already familiar with Roaring Penguin's MIMEDefang and were very attracted to CanIt-PRO's ease of configuration.” The Network Services team, made up of 4 people, also liked the functionality within CanIt-PRO to share control of settings with the users. This took some of the workload of managing Spam off of their shoulders. They configured the software so that students and staff had equal access to the filter controls, meeting with very positive feedback on the campus which boasts Internet access in all academic, administrative and residential buildings, as well as wireless in many.

LeTourneau runs CanIt-PRO on two Dell PowerEdge Servers running Linux. The results were immediate and impressive. Cooper explains, “The users were seeing far, far less spam and in turn we were getting far fewer complaints.” Over the course of a month CanIt-PRO processes approximately 673,000 emails. A full 278,000 a month are blocked as spam.

As Cooper says: “We're very happy to find a product that does exactly what we need. I'm not sure we could be any more happy with CanIt. This is as close as you can get to perfection.”

Support Kudos

Of course, with any product there will be questions and the occasional need for tech support. Roaring Penguin doesn't drop the ball here, either. As happy as Cooper and the rest of the team are with the CanIt-PRO product, they also sing the praises of the Roaring Penguin support philosophy. “...just the fact that when you have problems you get people who work on the product daily helping you is amazing,” says Cooper.

Stop the Presses!

At the time of the interview with Ethan Cooper, he and his team were planning to upgrade to CanIt-PRO 4.0.1. Well, they went ahead and did the upgrade over the course of their lunch break. “Yes, we did it during the lunch hour,” affirms Cooper, “It took us about 20 minutes.” For LeTourneau, the only real effect was a slight delay in incoming email and a twenty-minute period where people couldn't change their anti-spam settings.

About Roaring Penguin

Roaring Penguin Software Inc.: the e-mail filtering experts. We are committed to providing intelligent, cost-effective solutions to Web Hosts, ISPs, enterprises, and campuses. Our acclaimed mail-filtering and networking products include the MIMEDefang e-mail inspection software and CanIt enterprise anti-spam solutions. www.roaringpenguin.com.