GFI MailEssentials

Banyan International Corporation is the nation's leading provider of emergency medical kits. To maintain that leadership role, Banyan depends on strong lines of communication with its stakeholders. When one of those lines of communication, email, became mired with spam, they asked us to help.

Spam is more than just a waste of employee time and network resources. It is a common delivery system for malware, making spam protection vital for network security.

Banyan receives an average of seven-hundred-thirty messages a day. Eighty-three percent of those messages are spam. While Banyan's anti-virus package offered some spam protection in the form of keyword checking, maintaining the list of keywords was more time-consuming than dealing with the spam manually. Banyan needed an anti-spam solution that featured a Bayesian spam filter.

Bayesian spam filters calculate the probability of a message being spam based on its contents. Unlike simple content-based filters, Bayesian spam filtering learns from spam and good mail, resulting in a robust, adaptive, and efficient anti-spam approach that hardly returns any false positives.

We decided to implement GFI MailEssentials because of its Bayesian spam filter and several other features. GFI MailEssentials integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange. GFI MailEssentials is server-based, eliminating the deployment and administrative hassle associated with desktop-based anti-spam products.  GFI MailEssentials can download updates to the Bayesian filter from the GFI site, ensuring that it recognizes the latest spam and spamming techniques. GFI MailEssentials can route spam to a public folder, allowing users to review email that has been flagged as spam quickly. GFI MailEssentials automatically adds outbound email recipients to a whitelist, so emails from those senders are not flagged as spam. GFI MailEssentials supports third-party DNS blacklists and public databases of known spammers. GFI MailEssentials detects forged headers, encoded IPs, spam mutation, and spam sent from invalid domains.

The result of this solution has been phenomenal. Banyan has saved the clutter of over 100,000 spam messages in the last six months. If dealing with each of those messages took only three seconds, dealing with all of them would have taken over eighty hours. That's two weeks of an employee's time!