Cupertino, Calif. – November 20, 2006 – Proofpoint, Inc., the leader in large-enterprise messaging security solutions, today announced that Grand Valley State University, a public university in the state of Michigan, has deployed the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ appliance to protect the inboxes of more than 20,000 students, faculty and staff from spam and viruses. Grand Valley State chose Proofpoint to eliminate the performance issues and high incidence of false positives that the university was experiencing with its previous anti-spam solution.

Grand Valley State University is based in Allendale, Mich., about 15 miles west of Grand Rapids. The university has been named one of “America’s 100 Best College Buys” by Institutional Research and Evaluation, Inc. for 10 years straight. As with most universities, Grand Valley State is under constant assault from spam and viruses that, left unchecked, clog both student and faculty inboxes.

The university decided it needed a new solution to combat spam and viruses – one that would work more accurately and require much less time to maintain than its previous anti-spam product. The solution also needed to have robust end-user controls, such as easy-to-use “safe-list” capabilities so individual users can always receive mail from designated senders. After evaluating a variety of the most popular enterprise messaging security solutions, Grand Valley State selected the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway based on these criteria.

“With our old anti-spam solution, we couldn’t quarantine more than 400,000 messages at one time. For a university of our size, this meant we couldn’t keep them around for more than a few days before we’d hit our quarantine limit and our email system would slow to a crawl,” said Tom Norman, email administrator for Grand Valley State University. “Our Proofpoint deployment doesn’t suffer from these restrictions and performance has been outstanding. Proofpoint’s anti-spam effectiveness has proven to be much higher and the system’s near-perfect accuracy has eliminated our problems with false positives. The Proofpoint appliance also requires very little maintenance, saving hours of administration time each week.”

The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway is an easy to deploy appliance that stops spam and viruses at the enterprise gateway. Proofpoint’s MLX™ machine learning technology analyzes more than 200,000 attributes in every email message in order to accurately identify spam and viruses with the industry’s highest accuracy rate.

In addition to the increased performance and accuracy, Proofpoint also provides Grand Valley State with a flexible messaging security solution that puts control into the hands of the users. Users can easily manage their email quarantines, personal safe- and block-lists and even choose from different levels of anti-spam protection.

“As a university, we take academic freedoms very seriously,” said Norman. “So it was important for us to find a solution that allows users complete control over their email preferences, including the ability to allow or block individual senders or to opt-out of email scanning altogether. Proofpoint gives us that flexibility and allows our users to receive the content they want to receive.”

“As inbound email volumes continue to rise and spammers and malware writers take advantage of increasingly sophisticated delivery techniques, many organizations are finding that their current messaging security solutions just can’t keep pace,” said Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint. “Proofpoint is quickly emerging as the most effective, user-friendly and easy-to-manage messaging security solution available. Like Grand Valley State, more and more organizations are making the switch to Proofpoint because of our leading-edge technology, outstanding service and support and continuing commitment to 100 percent customer satisfaction.”

Proofpoint offers a free, 45-day trial version of its anti-spam solution that can be downloaded by visiting:

http://www.proofpoint.com/trial

To download complete case studies about leading enterprises, universities and government organizations that have deployed Proofpoint’s messaging security solutions, please visit Proofpoint’s online Resource Center at: http://www.proofpoint.com/resources.

About Proofpoint, Inc.
Proofpoint provides messaging security solutions for large enterprises to stop spam, protect against email viruses, ensure that outbound messages comply with both corporate policies and external regulations and prevent leaks of confidential information via email and other network protocols. The company's flagship products, the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ and Proofpoint Protection Server® provide future-proof messaging security using Proofpoint MLX™ technology, an advanced machine learning system developed by Proofpoint scientists and engineers. Proofpoint was founded by technology visionary and former CTO of Netscape Communications, Eric Hahn. The Cupertino, California-based company is funded by investors including Benchmark Capital, Bridgescale Partners, Inventures Group, JAFCO Ventures, Meritech Capital, Mohr, Davidow Ventures, and RRE Ventures. For more information, please visit http://www.proofpoint.com.

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