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Significantly reducing the quantity of unwanted e-mail and increasing the speed of message delivery were just some benefits the City of Richmond in British Columbia, experienced after implementing a combined messaging and security system.
The system – based on MailChannels' Traffic Control and Cloudmark Authority's anti-spam, anti-phishing and anti-virus protection technology – was implemented last April.
It controls the daily influx of some 200,000 e-mails, ensuring unwanted ones don't find their way into employees' Inboxes.
Since the rollout, the 1,500 City staff have seen at least a 50 per cent decrease in spam, viruses, and phishing e-mails, as well as fewer false positives (when a legitimate e-mail gets wrongly identified as inappropriate).
Furthermore, this lightened load means the City's mail server is not bogged down and the delivery of legitimate e-mail isn't impeded.
The City of Richmond - that includes the departments of Engineering, Waste Removal, Parks and Recreation and Cultural Affairs – functions much like a service provider to its employees, making Internet access and other communication services available.
The technology is based on a 'division of labour' whereby e-mails pass through a traffic control component before being sent to a filtering system, and finally to the mail server that then distributes the messages.
Vancouver-based MailChannels Corp., a developer of e-mail infrastructure protection products, partnered with Cloudmark Inc., a developer of anti-spam, anti-phishing and anti-virus products, in May 2006.
The approach of MailChannels' Traffic Control is to identify sources of abusive mail by observing the reputation and behaviour of senders, says Ken Simpson, CEO of MailChannels.
"Spammers will send e-mail from thousands of different IP addresses for very short periods of time." Legitimate senders, on the other hand, send mail from a predictable list of IP addresses across an extended length of time.
Once sources are identified, Traffic Control assigns network and e-mail server resources to slow abusive mail traffic, while freeing the channels for legitimate mail.
The idea, says Simpson, is that spammers will lose patience waiting for messages to feed through the tightened channels, and decide to focus their attention elsewhere.
The technology doesn't just grant passage to good mail, it also speeds delivery by allocating extra bandwidth, he says.
Once e-mail traffic has been controlled, the Cloudmark filtering component tackles the remaining message flow by distinguishing the good from the bad.
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