University of Texas Medical Branch

University of Texas Medical Branch Cures Spam Problem, Gives Employees Control Over Ailing Email with Proofpoint Protection Server®

BATTLING SPAM In 1881 the Texas legislature authorized founding of the University of Texas and the University of Texas Medical Department, which would later become the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). UTMB was Texas's first medical school and remained the only medical school in the state until 1949. Today, UTMB's primary mission encompasses education and healthcare research and the center serves as a major hub for patient care for the Galveston and Houston metropolitan areas.

In late 2003, after mounting complaints from employees about the steady rise of graphic and offensive email coming into the organization, UTMB IT department lead security analyst Robert Shaffer, began evaluating the impact of the spam issue within the UTMB community. “We were being contacted more and more frequently regarding unsolicited email reaching end-user inboxes,“ said Shaffer. “Employees were both angered and disturbed by these images and advertisements.“ With 12,500 end-users, including medical researches, doctors, academics, students and administrative staff, UTMB's IT staff had a very large and diverse user base to accommodate. “We knew we needed to implement a solution, but wanted to be sure that the technology we chose met the very specific needs of our users,“ Shaffer said.

A SINGLE GOAL, MANY NEEDS
Shaffer and his team began the anti-spam product evaluation process by meeting with a focus group of end users. “We wanted to be sure that we truly understood the needs of our end users, so we met with a representative group of non-technical users to ask them what they needed from their email.“ This focus group included academics, medical staff, researchers and administrative support staff.

According to Shaffer, the survey group was fairly reluctant to consider implementing an anti-spam solution. “At first, our email users didn't want their spam looked at or blocked because they didn't want to take a chance on losing a valuable piece of email that might be filtered out as junk,“ said Shaffer. There was a genuine concern across the survey group that if the wrong email were to be falsely classified, it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in research money. “The bottom line was that our end users absolutely required 100% control over their inboxes,“ said Shaffer.

To further understand the nature and type of spam users were receiving, Shaffer and his team asked all end users to forward offensive unsolicited emails to a universal email address where he and his team performed a detailed trend analysis. Shaffer determined that the university community was receiving 170,000 unsolicited emails a day. “Initially we tried to block spam by setting up universal safe- and block- lists to filter out offensive emails,“ said Shaffer. However, this approach failed because it was difficult to stay ahead of constantly morphing spam and, more importantly, because end-users were not amenable to giving up control of their email inboxes to the universal block lists.

Based on these preliminary activities, Shaffer and his team had a clear set of requirements that any proposed antispam solution needed to have. “From the end-user perspective, we needed a solution that was not only able to quarantine and provide safe-list features, but one that could also allow users to 'opt-out' of having their mail filtered in the first place,“ said Shaffer. “We knew we needed a very accurate solution, and wanted to be sure we selected a vendor that would give us a very high level of support.“

ONE PLATFORM, MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS
With the results of their trend analysis pointing to a need for a flexible anti-spam solution, Shaffer and his team set out to test several anti-spam products. Before evaluating Proofpoint, UTMB evaluated several competing products. After being disappointed with the results of those products, Shaffer and his team began a full evaluation of the Proofpoint Protection Server.

“Proofpoint was the only solution that met all of our requirements,“ said Shaffer. “The other products didn't provide the level of flexibility, accuracy and support that we were looking for.“

Proofpoint's individual safe- and block-lists proved to be a huge selling point to the user base at UTMB who were very adamant about maintaining control over their inboxes. “We looked at Proofpoint on a live UTMB mail stream for several weeks and were so impressed with the results that we moved to a full scale product roll-out in July of 2004. Proofpoint more than met the needs of our users, proved to be technically reliable and accurate, and the company gave our IT department excellent support.“

Proofpoint also provided UTMB the added benefit of an additional layer of virus protection. UTMB also deployed Proofpoint's Virus Protection module (powered by F-Secure), giving UTMB and extra level of defense against viruses at the gateway. UTMB was already in production with F-Secure as part of their virus protection efforts. According to Shaffer, the Proofpoint Protection Server successfully blocked all virus attacks that were missed by UTMB's existing desktop anti-virus protection. “This tiered approach to anti-virus has provided us with additional peace of mind,“ said Shaffer.

Users at UTMB are extremely pleased with the accuracy and flexibility of Proofpoint's solution. “We've had nothing but rave reviews about Proofpoint Protection Server. The community is happy they have control over their inboxes and personal quarantines, and IT is pleased because of the overall effectiveness of the solution. With end user tuning, the Proofpoint solution offers over 99% accuracy in spam blocking,“ said Shaffer. “We no longer have to worry about offensive email popping up in end user inboxes.“

ABOUT UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MEDICAL BRANCH
University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) is a major academic health center focused on health science education, patient care, research, and community service. For more than a century, dedicated teams of UTMB employees and volunteers have committed themselves to service, diversity, education, community, and innovation—all with the common goal of safeguarding the health of Texas. UTMB serves the greater Houston and Galveston areas and operates clinics and educational programs across the state.