Syratech is a mid-sized international manufacturer and distributor of quality home décor, silverware, and gift items…

Situation

Syratech is a mid-sized international manufacturer and distributor of quality home décor, silverware, and gift items. The company operates six sites in the U.S., one in Puerto Rico, and five more in Asia. Mike Burns, the Networking Services Manager for Syratech’s North American site describes a simple, but serious problem his company was facing. “We were receiving tons and tons of spam. In fact, some of our people were receiving nothing but spam e-mail.”

Burns had some experience with a Linux-based spam filter he helped build, but it couldn’t keep up with the amount of junk mail his network was receiving. It just wasn’t fast enough, he said. He needed to find a new solution to his ever-growing spam problem.

Anti-Spam Solution

Burns decided to outsource the spam filtering job. Three spam blockers were targeted: Barracuda, MX Logic, and Securence. All three were tested.

Burns was very familiar with Barracuda because it was used at one of the network sites he previously managed. But when he tested Barracuda at Syratech, it didn’t perform well at all. “It failed miserably,” he said.

Burns had heard good things about MX Logic when it came to spam filtering. However, during their test configuration, MX Logic made a serious mistake, which ended up sending thousands of Syratech’s incoming messages to the wrong server. Ironically, this server was set up to test the effectiveness of Securence. When Burns was reviewing his test reports, he noticed Securence showed approximately 3,000 more blocked e-mails than expected. As it turned out, Securence was not only blocking its own spam, it was also blocking spam that should have been stopped by MX Logic.

“That pretty much settled the case,” said Burns. “We decided to go with Securence.”

Since then, Securence has been very effective, said Burns. “It’s accurate, and I like that I don’t have to manage it. Also, it was extremely easy to implement. Once we made the decision to go with Securence, we were up and running in about 20 minutes.”

After carefully considering and testing several options, Syratech chose Securence to solve their serious spam problem. Thanks to Securence being an accurate, cost-effective solution, Syratech was able to consistently filter out nearly 100% of their unwanted mail.