SpamSentinel Customer Profile
At the University of Nebraska at Kearney, we provide approximately 7,500 active email accounts to faculty, staff, and students. The system is a university-wide Lotus Notes/Domino infrastructure where each campus manages and runs it own Domino servers. It need not be said that spam is an issue here. Many of our faculty and staff publish their email addresses on our website (http://www.unk.edu), and in the past, we have also published a searchable on-line student email directory.
The system is supported and managed by one person, a testament to Domino's ROI. Our students use iNotes 6 to access their accounts, and we install and support the Lotus Notes client for most of our faculty and staff. One of the most important things we were looking for in an antispam solution was software that we didn't have to baby-sit; software that we didn't have to spend a lot of time "teaching" and adjusting.
Another important consideration for us is the somewhat unique challenges in an academic environment. Freedom of speech (and information) is an important tradition, and it is not for the IT department to decide what is pertinent to the "business" (teaching) of this institution. As obvious as this seems, we wanted to find software that was blocking spam and not, for example, filtering out all the messages that contained the word "sex".
We also considered how involved our users would have to be. Ideally, we wanted something centralized so that we would not have to deal with the issues of training our users, but this is a bit of a contradiction to our first goal of finding software that would not require a lot of administrative work. After all, we could put the responsibility in the hands of our users, but I knew that if we did this, we would not make a lot of headway in our battle against spam.
Last and most obvious, pricing was an important consideration. We're funded through the State of Nebraska, and like most states, Nebraska's budget problems are having a major impact on the operation of both K-12 and higher education.
With these goals in mind, we set out to try to find software that was easy to manage, that would impact our spam problem but would not appear to the faculty as a filter, that would not require a lot of training for our users, and that was affordable. And of course, being a Lotus Notes/Domino shop, finding a Domino-based solution was a goal but not a necessity.
We first saw SpamSentinel from MayFlower Software (http://www.maysoft.com) mentioned on the LNOTES-L mailing list. The software has blacklisting and whitelisting capabilities, but the true strength of the software is how it accesses a "shared" spam database called SpamNet (http://www.spamnet.com), which half a million people are contributing to and updating constantly. The idea of not having to worry about tweaking rules and filters intrigued us, so we downloaded the trial for the Lotus Notes client. We definitely noticed a difference, but it was difficult to get a feel for what the software was doing behind the scenes. A few weeks later, we decided to install the server trial, and see what effect it would have system-wide.
One of the things that immediately impressed me about MayFlower was how hands-on they are with their customers, and we weren't even a customer at this point. We set up a time to work on the servers, and using SameTime, they walked us through the install and configuration. After about 20 minutes and a quick reboot, we were running SpamSentinel and catching spam.
The only issue we ran into (and we ran into it almost immediately) was that SpamSentinel was often failing in its connections to SpamNet. When this "spam check" failed, the message was let through instead of being quarantined. Our understanding was that SpamSentinel had never seen our kind of volume before, but within a week, MayFlower had addressed this issue.
After that fix was applied, SpamSentinel was catching 70 to 75% of our spam, and our users were reporting a noticeable difference. MayFlower was checking in with us regularly and would often watch the console and the quarantine through SameTime to get an idea how their software was performing in our environment. We were having a few false positives, so we started getting our users used to the idea of checking the quarantine database. This was as simple as sending out a short message to our client users describing the quarantine database and providing a database link to it for them.
A few days later, MayFlower had a new version they wanted us to try. It had an adjustable confidence level setting and addressed some of the false positives we were having. They helped us upgrade through SameTime and made recommendations on where to set the confidence level. We talked to a few of our users to get a little feedback and actually ended up going a little lower on the confidence level (20%) to catch more spam. After this upgrade and adjustment, SpamSentinel started catching 85 to 90% of our spam with a negligible number of false positives, and obviously, we became a customer.
SpamSentinel met the goals mentioned above:
--There was no lengthy process involved in teaching the software. The only number we had to tweak a little was the confidence level setting. The software itself was basically up and running in 20 minutes.
--The software is catching spam. It is not filtering messages based on rules or criteria. It is using a shared database of known spam that is being updated constantly by half a million people. (We have noticed that a little more spam sneaks through on the weekends. Our theory is that this is due to the nature of SpamNet and it's dependence on user contributions: Not as many people are actively contributing to SpamNet when they are not at work.)
--No user training was required. The only thing we had to do was to explain the idea of a quarantine and show our users how to access it.
--The price met our budget requirements, and MayFlower worked closely with us to make sure this was possible.
We have been extremely pleased with SpamSentinel and the relationship we've developed with MayFlower. We have a very small IT staff, and our users are just as likely to see one of us out replacing a hard drive as they are hearing about the latest system upgrade we'll be performing over the weekend. We do what it takes to get the job done, and that's how I feel about MayFlower. They went to great lengths to make sure SpamSentinel worked in our environment and that we were satisfied with it before we even became a customer.
The combination of antispam and antivirus software on our Domino servers means that our users have very little junk to deal with, and as I mentioned above, it's all managed by one person... a testament to the power of Domino and excellent third party software developers such as MayFlower Software.
|
Tim McMullen is the
System Administrator,
Information Technology Services at the University of Nebraska at Kearney
mcmullent@unk.edu
"SpamSentinel met the goals mentioned above:
--There was no lengthy process involved in teaching the software. The only number we had to tweak a little was the confidence level setting. The software itself was basically up and running in 20 minutes." |
| "We have been extremely pleased with SpamSentinel and the relationship we've developed with MayFlower. " |
|
|