Chabot-Las Positas Community College District
Providing Maximum Email Protection
Chabot-Las Positas Community College District uses M+Guardian for maximum protection of faculty and staff from spam with minimum administration efforts
Background
The Chabot-Las Positas Community College District consists of 2 autonomous colleges in Hayward and Livermore California as well as a district office in Pleasanton. A total of 1500 faculty and staff cater to the needs of some 22,000 students. The fundamental mission of the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District is to provide the leadership and resources to ensure that all students within the District have the opportunity to pursue and achieve their educational goals. From a collaboration perspective the district uses Novell GroupWise to meet its needs for uninterrupted and reliable communication between students, instructors, and administrative staff. For over 2 years, the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District has been using Messaging Architects’ Guardian technology to protect the two colleges’ messaging systems from the constant spam and virus attacks. Last December they upgraded to the latest version of the solution – the Linux-based M+Guardian Appliance.
Staying ahead of the Spammers with the Least Amount of IT Overhead
The Chabot-Las Positas Community College District IT Department opted for the Guardian solution after they had unsuccessfully attempted to contain spam using Guinevere. That product was unable to cope with the volume of unwanted email that kept getting into the GroupWise systems. Like any educational institution, the colleges rely heavily on email and the ratio of spam to legitimate email is roughly in ratio of 10 to 1.In other words, there is quite a bit of unwanted messages that need to be stopped before they enter and bog down the colleges’ email systems.
John McHugh, Network System Specialist, talks about his experience using Guardian technology, “Overall it has been a very positive experience. We finished the upgrade to M+Guardian not too long ago and are still learning some of the advanced features the solution offers. What I really like about this version is the fact that it is an appliance that comes pre-configured and optimized and is very reliable without requiring a lot of setup on my part. Moreover, the fact that it is NDS-based is a huge selling point for me, as it allows me to manage profiles and policies centrally. M+Guardian also scales really well and is able to easily handle all the email traffic for both college email systems.”
One of the valuable features that M+Guardian offers is the Executive Reports that provide overall statistics about message flow, trapped messages, spam in the quarantine, etc. “The Executive Reports are very handy as they allow us to show the administration and anyone else just how much spam is being filtered and demonstrate the ROI. People are always surprised when I tell them we average 60,000 spam a day versus 6,000 legitimate email through the Internet email gateway” explains McHugh.
The fact that M+Guardian is doing its job well is confirmed by an instance when for a day one of the email gateway servers was misconfigured to route incoming mail around M+Guardian and directly into the Groupwise system. As a result, people’s inboxes were flooded with spam. “Right away we started getting calls from employees complaining about the spam,” McHugh recalls.
M+Guardian’s deployment in the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District email system has brought the desired level of protection for the end users without requiring intensive management efforts from the IT staff. The web-based administrative portal is easy and straight-forward and allows access to it from anywhere. “The M+Guardian appliance really meets the needs our colleges with its flexibility and numerous features. It works very well and I will recommend that another M+Guardian server be deployed once we start providing email to our students later this year,” concludes McHugh.
