Pacific Sunwear

Pacific Sunwear Wipes Out Spam and Offensive Email, Gives Users Control Over Their Inboxes with Proofpoint™

COMBATING OFFENSIVE SPAM Pacific Sunwear began as a small-scale surf shop in Newport Beach, California in 1980. The company was not unlike many of its neighbors until the founders hit upon an idea that would launch Pacific Sunwear to the forefront of active wear retailers — the shopping mall. Pacific Sunwear's notoriety and clientele grew exponentially soon after opening its first mall location in 1981 at Santa Monica Place.

Today, Pacific Sunwear operates in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. The company has played an integral role in the popularization of brands such as Stussy, Billabong and Gotcha, and has helped bring the California-influenced surfer/skateboarder style into the mainstream. Pacific Sunwear launched a total of 90 new stores in 2003 and plans to open 110 in 2004. As of July 2004, the company operates 933 stores.

Pacific Sunwear's rapid growth, however, had brought its IT department to a crossroads. In the fall of 2003, it came to the attention of Dwayne Russell, Director of IT Services at Pacific Sunwear, that there was a high volume of extremely offensive pornographic spam being directed at a female employee. Given the nature of the content and the impact it was having on the employee, Russell and his team sprang into action. “Initially, we set up individual filters on our LotusNotes server as a means of blocking incoming spam,” said Russell. “However, we soon realized that these filters weren't enough to combat the issue. We also realized that unsolicited email was filling up inboxes across the company and eating up server capacity and network bandwidth before we could write rules to block it. At that point, our focus changed very quickly from one of protecting a single employee, to protecting the entire enterprise.”

One major factor contributing to the high volume of spam flooding Pacific Sunwear's inboxes — often in peaks of more than 30,000 messages a day — was the fact that the company used to offer free, hosted email accounts on its PACSUN.com domain. “When we offered this service, thousands of consumers signed up for a PACSUN.com address,” said Russell. “Users would sign up for all manner of subscription services, so when we discontinued the service, both subscription and unsolicited emails continued to pour in to that domain. It became overwhelming.” What Pacific Sunwear needed was an immediate and flexible solution to its growing spam problem that would accommodate a rapidly growing enterprise.

SELECTING A FLEXIBLE, EFFECTIVE IN-HOUSE SOLUTION TO THE SPAM PROBLEM
Russell and his team began their evaluation of possible solutions by considering technologies to add onto their existing Domino server. “We looked at solutions from Symantec, TrendMicro and Network Associates among others,” said Russell. "The problem with these solutions was that they placed too much strain our servers and caused the system to crash. If we were to go with one or a combination of these solutions we would need to purchase additional hardware, which made the cost jump considerably."

The team then switched its focus toward implementing a “secondary spam solution.” At first, Russell and his team explored the possibility of a hosted antispam solution. “We looked into a solution from MessageLabs, but ultimately decided that in order to have the desired level of control over administration we would need to deploy a solution that we administered ourselves,” said Russell. Simply put, a hosted solution did not offer Pacific Sunwear the level of control required to solve its message-protection problems.

Russell then evaluated Sophos PureMessage, which the team tested for approximately two months. “The overall effectiveness rating was about 85%,” said Russell. “At the time this seemed like an acceptable rate. However, Sophos PureMessage's price point was too high for what we were targeting and the solution itself was too much of an administrative headache. With PureMessage, we would continually have to go back to the company for scripting updates as spam and spamming techniques changed. It required too much maintenance on our part.”

This brought Pacific Sunwear to Proofpoint. “We were initially skeptical about testing the product because Proofpoint was very different from the other solutions. For one, it is Linux based, and we're not a Linux shop,” said Russell. “But when we got the solution installed it was an amazing experience. Proofpoint trapped 95% of the spam messages out of the box with no training of the filters,” said Russell.

In addition to Proofpoint's superior accuracy, Russell and his team were particularly impressed by Proofpoint's safe-list and block-list capabilities. Proofpoint's quarantine digest feature gives end users confidence that valid email is not being inadvertently caught by the system. Additionally, Pacific Sunwear was quickly able to configure its global safe- and block-lists. Proofpoint also gives individual users control over their personal safe- and block-lists, providing personalized spam detection and easing the burden on IT. “These features really worked out well here," said Russell. "Proofpoint lets individual users control their own email and that's a great thing.”

PACIFIC SUNWEAR
Pacific Sunwear is a leading specialty retailer of everyday casual apparel, accessories and footwear designed to meet the needs of active teens and young adults. As of July 31, 2004, the company operated 717 PacSun stores, 82 PacSun outlet stores and 148 d.e.m.o. stores, for a total of 947 stores in 50 states and Puerto Rico.