Millikin University Case Study

Millikin University Finds a Spam Solution that Matches Its High Standard of Performance

Case Study

Client Since: 2008
Number of Users: 3000
Product: M+Guardian

Objective: Millikin was looking for a solution that offered better catch rates, improved performance, and more flexible features.

Background

Established in 1901 in Decatur, Illinois, Millikin is a private four-year university with approximately 2,200 students and 500 staff and faculty. For the last century, its mission has been to blend the practical side of learning with the literary and classical. The result is one of the nation's first small, comprehensive universities where programs in classical music vie in excellence with those in accounting and the health sciences. Students not only learn through textbooks, but get hands-on experience through internships, consulting projects, and one-on-one work with professors. That experience makes Millikin grads successful: More than 99 percent of graduates gain employment or entry to graduate/professional school within six months of graduation.

Migration to M+Guardian: Performance is Up, Spam is Down

Because Millikin University prides itself on a culture of collaborative learning, and because it's moving toward paperless communication, email is a critical part of Millikin's academic process. All staff, faculty, and students have email, with plans for rolling out email to alumni. Email communication at Millikin is handled through Novell GroupWise; like many academic institutions, there is a mix of Windows and Mac systems.

On a daily basis, the institution's email system receives between 150,000 and 200,000 email messages, of which an average 93 percent are spam. Frustrated with performance issues and a lack of features in its spam-blocking solution, Millikin recently migrated to Messaging Architects' Linux-based M+Guardian appliance.

The switch to M+Guardian brought significant improvement to the email system's spam management. With the previous solution, all inbound messages had to enter the email system before they could be scanned. As a result, the load was massive, eventually getting so bad the university had to upgrade its hardware. "The CPUs just weren't powerful enough to handle the extra load the old product required," says Chris Myers, Millikin University's User Services Specialist, who manages Millikin's email system. "In contrast, M+Guardian actually lets your email system be an email system, instead of adding all these extra utilities on top of it."

A key feature that has improved performance is M+Guardian's thresholds option, which offers automatic throttling of connections. Before, Myers could see spammers hitting the GWIAs, trying to harvest legitimate email, and could do nothing about it. M+Guardian lets him automatically cut them off. "We've seen a tremendous improvement in performance,” says Myers. “Our email system has two GWIAs. One handles inbound and outbound traffic; the other is for secondary inbound. We've gone from more than 120 threads on each GWIA — with 90 percent of them in use constantly — to requiring only 20 threads with only one or two in use at a time.”

Another serious performance issue popped up when Myers ran bulk loads of directory information. The previous solution took those messages, converted them to files, scanned them for spam, and passed them along to the GroupWise system. The process would take more than 40 hours, during which time messages were backing up. To top it all off, password changes would back up into the queue because they were converted to files as well. “It just created a big headache,” explains Myers. "Since we switched to M+Guardian, we've had at least a fourfold increase in speed.”

Myers also appreciates the fact the M+Guardian appliance is Linux-based. “It has a much smaller operating system footprint because you don't have a GUI running and all the services associated with that. Plus, because Linux itself is more bullet-proof when it comes to viruses, it's also more robust performance-wise.”

Since implementing M+Guardian, Myers spends a lot less time managing the server. Some weeks, he doesn't have to touch the system. System uptime has also greatly improved. In the past, if there was a bad message, the thread would get stuck on it trying to process it until Myers restarted the server to get email flowing again. Myers found himself doing this every three or four days. The problem was compounded by the fact that the old solution would not close down cleanly, the server had to be restarted with the MTA still loaded. If the MTA needed a restart because of configuration changes, it would just stop. The email process would back up until someone noticed the problem.

Improved and Flexible End-User Spam Control

Myers isn't the only one pleased with the migration. End users have noticed a huge reduction in spam, and find the tagging much more accurate. Users who have carelessly given out their email addresses to subscribe to newsletters are finding these messages tagged as they should be. So, M+Guardian is helping Millikin's IT department enforce email usage policies by making users adhere to the school's rules regarding newsletter subscriptions.

During the transition to M+Guardian, Myers set up the system to simply tag spam and release it to the users' mailboxes; however, due to the accuracy of the system, after a few weeks the department made a policy change to enable the quarantine by default for all users, allowing them to choose to have the messages tagged and released if they so desired.

Myers is extremely pleased with M+Guardian's granular policies and settings. "You can include and exclude any number of groups and users on anything and everything." Before, Myers could only do system-wide whitelisting and blacklisting. So, if he had one user who needed messages from a particular domain, he had to allow that domain for everyone. He'd then have to restart the MTA and server. Now users can manage this themselves without Myers's intervention. In addition, he can now choose to block or allow IP addresses, which is a lot more accurate than dealing with domains.

Without reservation, Myers and the students, staff, and faculty of Millikin University are thrilled with the changes they've seen in the system since implementing M+Guardian.

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