How ISP ihouseweb Inc eradicated spam with SpamTitan we over are now blocking 90% of email as spam.
SpamTitan has helped save the organization tens of thousands of dollars per month in unnecessary service calls and lost customers. Background IHOUSEWEB is a privately held corporation which began trading in 2001. With headquarters in Oakland, California and site offices in Davis and Sacramento the company offers web hosting and IT infrastructure to over 30,000 real estate professionals across the U.S. The company employs 40 people who manage and service over 8000 customers and domains across the U.S. and Canada. Part of IHOUSEWEB s future growth strategy includes offering web hosting services to small and medium sized businesses in other specialist industries. The challenge IHOUSEWEB Incs customers had been seeing the level of spam messages increasing steadily, spam and all the damaging consequences it brings was leaking through the hosted email filtering service to customers inboxes. IHOUSEWEB Inc have always prided themselves of the level of care they provide to their customers. We found with the increasing levels of spam and related incidents, we were getting more and more support calls from unhappy customers. We realised this could not continue and began looking for an anti spam solution that guaranteed results. Web hosting is our business and email is very important to our customers, we were reaching the point where our current anti spam solutions inadequacies was causing us to lose customers which was totally unacceptable said Alan Aldrich, IT Manager. A key requirement for ISPs that are hosting email is the ability to detect and stop zombie PCs. Our previous solution was not preventing botnets on our network. The situation began to threaten our service delivery so seriously that the only option we had was to find a new solution that worked comprehensively in our ISP environment. Our existing spam filter was not delivering as promised IHOUSEWEB Inc invested considerable money and time in adopting the Mail Foundry Spam Filtering appliances and spent literally years attempting to work with the solution so that it would deliver on its promised of close to zero false positives including the promise of very little spam due to their supposed advantage of human generated spam filter rules. In reality continued Alan Aldrich IT Manager, we got many false positives and the appliances continued to pass through obvious spam. We finally gave up and started looking for an alternative solution to manage spam for our 8000+ domains in our web hosting business. 8000 customers in an isp environment
SpamTitan worked for us in terms of the mail load it could handle and more importantly the price points were what we were hoping for. 90% Spam Titan reduces spam, viruses, malware & other email threats by over 90% SpamTitan provides easy management and world class security Spam Titan arrived on IHOUSEWEB s radar early with rave reviews about ease of deployment, low cost and very effective spam filtering with minimal false positives. According to Mr Aldrich we decided to give it a try and immediately downloaded the Virtual VMware appliance and got some trial license keys and started testing. The installation in VMWare was quick and easy and the Administration Guide was clear and easy to follow. Spam Titan sales and support were exceptional in helping us get started and within 3 hours I had a 3 node cluster up and running and ready to test. We started by pointing just two of our internal domains at the Spam Titan appliances and were immediately happy to see how much spam was being blocked said Aldrich. Smart ISPs use SpamTitan to fight spam and viruses so customers don t have to Following the 30-day trial, IHOUSEWEB purchased an unlimited SpamTitan cluster license which was set up to filter email and tackle inbound spam and the increasing number of viruses and malware hitting the network. The improvements in terms of email flow and reduction is spam and viruses was immediate. When we first started using SpamTitan there was a lot of spam messages coming through our servers and ultimately reaching our customers inboxes but within a few days of deploying SpamTitan these had dropped significantly and our false positive rate which had been a big problem also dropped significantly, said Mr Aldrich. After a few days of Bayesian training, the evaluation devices had already learned sufficiently to start rejecting and accepting with exceptional accuracy. This coupled with the very flexible configuration of RBLS, RFC and sender compliance settings, in addition to some clever add-ons such as client OS identification made the decision easy - SpamTitan was the solution IHOUSEWEB had been looking for all along.
Our 30 Day Free Trial translates into Immediate Results SpamTitan has seamlessly scaled to handle our increasing traffic. comprehensive feature set with minimal administration A big benefit of SpamTitan to this ISP was the ease of setting up SpamTitan. SpamTitan has a very intuitive user interface and incorporated end user quarantines and automatic updating, making it a virtually administration-free solution. In addition to its ease of use and deployment, SpamTitan offered IHOUSEWEB a full set of features specifically designed for ISPs, these features allow the IT administrator to determine how stringently email will be blocked. spamtitan made migration from an existing solution easy. The Spam Titan Engineering team worked closely with IHOUSEWEB s in enabling them to make a seamless migration from Mail Foundry. According to Aldrich It was easy for us to implement several API calls from external scripts to upload all of our domains and standard policies to the appliance and the clustering worked perfectly to roll out the uploaded information from the cluster master to the slaves. On the day that we went live, we just had to change the MX records to point to the SpamTitans and off we went. The migration worked without a hitch and IHOUSEWEB was instantly pleased with the ability of SpamTitan to manage quarantines at administrator as well as at the user level. The individual quarantine reports allow each user to manage their blocked mail by simply clicking on a link in an email to release, whitelist or otherwise treat messages as they wish from their quarantine. For IHOUSEWEB the quarantine reports took a huge load off the Customer Service and IT staff who had previously spent many hours managing spam quarantine on the Mail Foundry on behalf of the customers. With our previous solution we never had the ability to cluster units, as well as saving us an enormous amount of time clustering also provides us with the crucial benefits associated with back up and failover said Aldrich. On the day they went live, IHOUSEWEB had just to change the MX records to point to their Spam Titan and off they went. The migration worked without a hitch and according to Aldrich we are very pleased with the ability of the Spam Titan to manage quarantines at Administrator level as well as at the User level with easy quarantine reports that the user can use to manage their blocked mail by simply clicking on a link in an email to release and white list messages they want from quarantine if they choose to receive the emailed report. Mr Aldrich highlighted that this takes a huge load off of our Customer Service and IT staff which had previously spent many hours managing spam quarantine on the Mail Foundry on behalf of the customers and having to do so on 4 units separately as Mail Foundry never supported clustering.
Since implementing SpamTitan we are providing a better service to our customers and that s what really matters. Scalability & Performance at the right price What appealed most to IHOUSEWEB about SpamTitan was the affordable price and the wide banded licenses as well as the ability to add unlimited domains at no extra cost. Consistently scoring highly in the Virus bulletin industry test SpamTitan was last month voted No. 1 anti spam solution, beating all other anti spam vendors tested. This high success rate was just one of the factors in IHOUSEWEB s decision to move to SpamTitan. Mr Aldrich reports that they have seen very few false positives since implementing and spam has virtually been eliminated. According to Aldrich we are a growing ISP and SpamTitan has seamlessly scaled to handle our increasing traffic while at the same time requiring very little management. SpamTitan has helped save the organization tens of thousands of dollars per month in unnecessary service calls and lost customers. We are now blocking over 90 percent of email as spam, said Aldrich. SpamTitan has allowed us to turn our attention to continuing to grow the company and serve our customers as best we can. Why IHOUSEWEB recommend Spam Titan Nno Hardware Cost With The Virtual Appliance clustered Management With A Great Web Based Gui easy And Flexible User Management Of Quarantine Superb Spam Blocking Ability Extremely Low False Positive Rate Vvery Good Api For Managing Domains And Domain/User Policies Eexcellent Customer Service And Responsiveness great Value For The Price Compared To Other Alternatives For further information visit www.spamtitan.com