Feather Falls Casino, located in Oroville, California, is a premier California gaming and entertainment facility, offering around the clock services. The casino includes a staff of 400, 70 of which utilize email. Whenever possible, these 70 staff members use face-to-face interaction and live telephone calls with patrons in order to maintain very personal high-touch relationships. When that is not practical, the fall-back is to use individualized email for communications. Consequently, both the reliability of their email system and the security of their email contacts are considered extremely important.
Several years ago, the organization made the decision to bring their email infrastructure in-house, deploying a Microsoft Exchange server. At that time, the organization also purchased a Symantec anti-spam product.
There were problems almost immediately. “After we first brought our email in-house, we noticed the problems we were having with spam grew exponentially,” says Assistant IT Director Jason Unck. “Our users began complaining of unwanted email.”
On average, users would receive between 20 and 30 junk emails daily while collectively losing between 5 and 10 legitimate messages from patrons to junk folders. As a result, staff spent more than an hour each week managing these unwanted email messages and scanning junk folders for legitimate email messages. | The IT team quickly chose to test replacement anti-spam solutions. “We decided to evaluate several email security products side-by-side including a Barracuda appliance, a different Symantec software product, and a Sendio appliance,” said Unck.
“We let each of them run for a two week period. The first two products required quite a bit more initial configuration than Sendio did, what they called a ‘tuning process’. After the tuning, a few things were still getting through and we were encountering false positives. Ultimately, out of the box, Sendio required the least amount of set-up and configuration, and it performed best.”
Each of the other solutions functioned “adequately,” but “Sendio performed head and shoulders above the rest,” according to Unck. “And, when we factored in cost, it was clear that Sendio was the right fit for us.”
Rather than attempting to filter messages based on analyzing message text (the content), Sendio filters messages based on the “reputation” of the email sender. Known senders who are already on the organization’s whitelist have a “perfect” reputation and their messages are immediately delivered, while new senders are given the opportunity to be automatically added to the whitelist after verifying that the email originates from a valid sending mail server and domain. | With Sendio in place, “spam disappeared,” said Unck.
Now, users receive on average between just 1 and 2 unwanted messages each month. And, IT staff spends fewer than 5 minutes each day managing email and their Sendio appliance.
“The reaction from users was almost unanimous glee,” said Unck. “It was a complete cessation of spam.” |
