City of Topeka
City of Topeka Eradicates Spam and Ensures Delivery of Valid Messages With Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The City of Topeka, Kansas, had been dealing with the growing spam problem for years. The community was using an outdated spam filter that was repeatedly withholding valid messages that were crucial to daily operations.
PROOFPOINT SOLUTION
The city chose to test and deploy the
Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ to eliminate “false positives” and more
effectively block spam email. The results
were so dramatic that the city purchased
and implemented Proofpoint technology
two weeks ahead of schedule.
RESULTS ACHIEVED
Across many branch offices, including
the police and fire departments, city hall
and the Department of Transportation,
very few false positives (or valid messages
withheld) were reported. With further
tuning of their Proofpoint system, The City
of Topeka is now so confident in the
accuracy of the Proofpoint Messaging
Security Gateway™, that messages that
receive a spam score of 40 or higher are
automatically deleted. This very aggressive
spam filtering policy speaks to the high
reliability of Proofpoint's spam detection
technology.
PRODUCTS DEPLOYED
I wear many different hats
in my position, and knowing
that my spam problem is under
control gives me the freedom to
concentrate on other important
projects.
Bill Stephens
Electronic Communications
Manager, City of Topeka, Kansas
NO, I DIDN'T GET THE MEMO Throughout several city departments in Topeka, Kansas, more than 1,300 municipal
employees rely on a centrally managed mail server to communicate, conduct city
business and receive critical information from a number of different sources.
Although the city's previous spam filter kept unsolicited email from reaching these branch employees with relative success, Bill Stephens, electronic communications manager for the City of Topeka, knew there was a problem. Stephens was concerned that too many important messages that needed immediate attention were being quarantined by the spam filter, potentialy jeopardizing the well-being of Topeka's citizens. He estimated that more than 20% of the email being quarantined as spam was actually legitimate email that should have been delivered directly to employees.
PICKING THE RIGHT SYSTEM
The City of Topeka researched a variety of anti-spam solutions, but quickly decided
on the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, a comprehensive hardware and software
solution based on the Proofpoint Protection
Server®. The hardened appliance, employing antivirus
software from F-Secure, protects corporate
messaging infrastructures from external email
threats, such as spam and viruses, and ensures
compliance with corporate email policies and
external regulations.
The decision to use the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway was an easy one for Bill Stephens. “Proofpoint helped us perform a spam audit through a trial use of the appliance, and we were amazed by the quantitative metrics that showed how many spam messages we were getting,” said Stephens.
The Proofpoint spam audit revealed that the City of Topeka's mail server was receiving between 600 and 1,000 spam emails per hour. If 20% of those were valid emails that were blocked by the previous spam filter, that meant that employees weren't operating with complete information. Immediately upon installing the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, Stephens saw the rate of false positives drop to less than one-tenth of one percent. With a small amount of tuning, performance has increased even more.
“Proofpoint's flexibility and the level of control we have over tuning the system has let us be extremely aggressive with our spam policies,” said Stephens. “We now automatically delete any message that receives a spam score higher than 40 because of our confidence in Proofpoint's spam detection capabilities.” Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway runs at City of Topeka's email gateway, spam and virus-infected emails are deleted or quarantined before they even reach the city's Exchange server, preserving precious network bandwidth and storage space.
SEAL OF APPROVAL
The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway was a hit with the City of Topeka right
away. Stephens was thrilled with how easy it was to install. “The Proofpoint appliance
is truly plug and play. It literally took five minutes out of the box to get it working,” said
Stephens. And after a quick phone consultation with Proofpoint support engineers to
configure the settings for maximum efficiency, he had completed the setup.
His users were happy too. He reported more than 100 calls from email users saying “I don't know what you've done, but this is working so much better!” Bill Stephens is glad to get such positive feedback from his users, but he's even happier that he's no longer getting the negative calls, which had become frequent. “I used to get 50 calls per week from people who had not gotten an important email they were expecting,” said Stephens.
This high level of accuracy is due to Proofpoint MLX™ Machine Learning technology, which classifies the City of Topeka's incoming email as spam or valid mail based on the analysis of more than 100,000 message attributes – roughly 30 times greater than the number of attributes analyzed by other anti-spam solutions.
Stephens has no doubt that choosing Proofpoint was the right decision for the City of Topeka. “I wear many different hats in my position, and knowing that my spam problem is under control gives me the freedom to concentrate on other important projects, such as maintaining the municipal Web sites and providing IT training to city employees. The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway has definitely been a great help in providing better service to our community.”
ABOUT THE CITY OF TOPEKA, KANSAS
The IT Department for the City of Topeka,
Kansas, is responsible for maintaining
hardware and supporting software for
1000 workstations, in addition to providing
computer training to city employees.
The IT staff also supports the city's
telephone system, all IP switches, voice
mail and a server farm of 30 Windowsbased
servers.
