Tractor company stops spam in its tracks

When Goldman Equipment opened its doors in Waterproof, Louisiana 60 years ago, farmers still used mules. Today, Goldman Equipment LLC has eight stores selling the most modern agricultural equipment. They are a full-line dealer for John Deere and Valley irrigation equipment, plus they sell or rent an extensive inventory of commercial sprayers and Liebrecht commercial agricultural ditching machines.

Their technologies department evaluates topography, tests and analyses soil, and determines the best fertilisers needed to maximise crop yield. Sixty years ago, communications consisted of telephones and mail.

Today Goldman Equipment has an IT department in their Waterproof headquarters and relies on email as a major means of communication.

Initially, Goldman Equipment's email was hosted at another company. Over the years, the email system became clogged with spam. Hours were wasted culling the legitimate messages from the chaff. The outsourcing company that handled the email constantly applied new filters to the system, but it couldn't keep up. A major communications apparatus was becoming a major pain.

Goldman Equipment's IT department basically consists of Blaine Merriet, company data processing manager. He's responsible for keeping the system up and running, planning and implementing new equipment, and solving computer problems at the company's eight locations.

All servers-document image storage, email, and business systems-are located at the main store in Waterproof. Currently, Blaine is replacing old servers with Dell PowerEdge 5 servers running Windows Server 3.

The business system server runs on UNIX. Satellite stores all have basic equipment as well as VTN routers to connect them to the servers. Merriet analysed at the spam problem, the price-per-mailbox, the number of users, and decided to bring it all in-house on a Dell PowerEdge mail server."Even though we had filters on the hosted email server, we still got a lot of spam," Merriet explained."With regular spam, image spam, PDF spam, phishing and a host of viruses, worms and Trojan horses, I knew we needed more a more effective solution. I eliminated security software because they didn't offer "I began researching email security appliances. I read all the reviews, compared the features and benefits, checked out the prices. To my surprise, the appliance with the less bad reviews was one that, frankly, I'd never heard of: Mail-SeCure from PineApp."

"Before I brought email in-house, we were having a terrible problem with image spam," Merriet confided". The filters they used just couldn't deal with the problem. Image spam was clogging our system and wasting valuable bandwidth." Once I installed the Mail-SeCure appliance to our network, image spam disappeared. It blocked all the spam and phishing schemes while letting all legitimate email through without a problem.

Plus Mail-SeCure's zero-day protection automatically protects us from viruses, worms and Trojan horses. One of the determining factors in choosing Mail-Secure was pricing. Since Goldman Equipment isn't a large corporation, Blaine was mindful of getting the most security for his IT dollar. When he discovered he could purchase a Mail-SeCure appliance with annual license renewals for less than competitors were charging for license renewals alone, the decision became a no-brainer. "To date, Mail-SeCure has been 100% efficient," Merriet concluded. "It works exactly like I wanted. Even installation was a snap. It worked right out of the box. All I had to do was enter our domain name and we were ready to go. It doesn't get any easier than that."

Mail-SeCure provides total perimeter security.

It is located outside the network, so it blocks threats like spam and viruses before they reach the network. It creates a buffer between the Internet and an organisation's email systems by using a complete system of perimeter anti-spam/anti-virus security layers.

Mail-SeCure proactively protects networks against targeted and non-targeted email threats

The appliance includes an arsenal of 11 anti-spam engines and five anti-virus engines that proactively protects organisations and enterprises from both targeted email threats (spam, viruses, worms, Trojan horses) and non-targeted email-related threats (mail-bombing, denial of service and backscatter). Anti-spam engines include pattern detection, zombie detection, zero-hour detection, IP reputation and image spam defense, plus a heuristic and a Bayesian engine to recognise spam in any form and block it. Anti-virus engines include three signature based, one heuristic based and one zero-hour detection mechanism.