University of Western Ontario finds that in the battle of spam, the best offense is a good defence

PRLog (Press Release) – Jan 25, 2008 – With a history dating back 125 years and a place of prominence as one of Canada's top Universities, the University of Western Ontario is a place of tradition and excellence. However, it is also a thoroughly modern school providing near campus-wide WiFi, promoting the use of RSS feeds, Podcasting and blogs among faculty and students. The embracing of technology can lead to other issues though, one of these being SPAM. “Out of a daily average of about 96,000 emails, about 85,000 were spam.” Explains Eric Cartman, System Administrator at Western. Eric and the rest of Western's IT team was already familiar with a couple of Roaring Penguin's products. “We'd been using SpamAssassin and [Roaring Penguin's] MimeDefang with success but were spending hours whitelisting, blacklisting, and tweaking settings trying to serve the diverse and changing needs of our users.”

Slow and steady, with instant results

The team was attracted to CanIt-PRO's price and features immediately, but two other factors made it the definite front runner. “The fact that Roaring Penguin could provide us with an in-house solution, capable of so much scalability was very important to us,” continues Cartman. They began running CanIt on two Intel-based Linux servers and made sure to phase in the new filter slowly. While many people are ready to jump right in and learn all about new software, others are more wary says Cartman, “There are some researchers, dealing with time constraints who may not have the luxury of trying to learn a new product that directly affects their ability to communicate with colleagues." Initially, the IT team set the basic settings for all users and immediately noticed a big difference. “All of a sudden, there was a lot less untagged spam”, remembers Cartman.

Eric's team has made it a point to educate the school about the power of CanIt-PRO, creating documentation and FAQ lists for all users, and allowing users to change their own settings online. Although some users still use the default settings, he is confident that by next autumn all users will be setting their own profiles, “The learning curve is exceptionally easy for both admins and final users.” The team also keeps things running smoothly by only performing changes/upgrades at pre-scheduled times.

Too much free time?

Now, almost three years after the initial CanIt-PRO install, Eric Cartman has plenty of time to sing its praises, as he spends very little time dealing with spam problems... at least on his end. “Most of that time is dedicated to experimenting with new CanIt features."

Just before we spoke, Eric was reading the release notes for CanIt-PRO 4.0, preparing for another upgrade. Says Cartman, “So far CanIt has performed very well, allowing us to deal with the daily influx of spam, but also spam storms and constantly evolving spammer strategies.” The university has had impressive results, with CanIt blocking approximately 85,000 spam emails per day.