Harrisonburg City Public Schools, located in Virginia’s scenic Shenandoah Valley, serves approximately 750 staff and 4,400 students across six schools and one technical center. Facing increasing reliance on email communication, the school district found that managing spam had become a time-consuming task, creating a growing burden on their IT team.
The Challenge
With around 1,050 email accounts for staff and students, Harrisonburg’s network was receiving an overwhelming volume of daily email traffic. While their existing open source spam filter called Bogofilter blocked most spam, it also misidentified a large number of legitimate emails (ham) as spam. This required the IT department to manually search and recover these messages, which became an inefficient and time-consuming process.
Dwayne Hottinger, the Network Administrator, noted that finding misidentified emails took up far too much of his time. The district needed a new solution that provided comprehensive protection, empowered end-users to manage their own spam, and was easy to deploy and manage. "The product generally worked well, but searching for the emails that had been wrongly quarantined was taking up way too much of my time."
Harrisonburg City Public Schools recognized the need for a new solution, and Dwayne Hottinger, the district’s Network Administrator, outlined three essential requirements:
- Comprehensive protection from spam and other email-borne threats;
- The responsibility for spam management needed to be shifted from IT to end-users;
- Easy deployment and easy management.
Spam often contains inappropriate or offensive subject matter and we needed to protect our students, staff and network from that.
The Solution
After evaluating several options, including Barracuda, Harrisonburg City Public Schools chose SpamTitan for its accurate detection, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. SpamTitan offered all the necessary features without requiring high-end hardware, making it a perfect fit for the district’s needs.SpamTitan was also considerably cheaper than any of the other products I looked at.” Harrisonburg installed SpamTitan in early 2007. According to Hottinger, “Setup was extremely easy. I downloaded SpamTitan ISO and had SpamTitan up and running in under 30 minutes. No configuration or tuning was necessary; it worked right out of the box.”
SpamTitan is a turn-key email security solution which has been designed to be easily managed by organizations of all size, even those with extremely limited in-house technical resources.
Some anti- spam solutions do not provide end-users with a mechanism to access quarantined items, SpamTitan, however, provides end-users with complete control over their own spam via Quarantine reports. A digest of quarantined emails is delivered to end-users and, using the links in the digest, users can specify whether an email is to be delivered, deleted or its sender whitelisted.
The feedback I've had from both faculty and staff has been very positive. They like seeing the emails that have been marked as spam and being able to choose to deliver or delete them. SpamTitan also has only a minimal management overhead.
The Results
Low Cost: SpamTitan was significantly more affordable compared to competing solutions like Barracuda, offering enterprise-level security at a fraction of the cost.
Quick Deployment: The installation and configuration process took less than 30 minutes, with no need for fine-tuning or complex setup.
Spam Blocking: The solution effectively blocked 100,000 junk messages each day, ensuring that inappropriate or offensive content never reached students’ inboxes.
Time Savings: By shifting spam management to staff and students, the IT team saved a significant amount of time. Hottinger noted that SpamTitan required minimal management, with automatic updates and seamless upgrades.
SpamTitan has saved me a significant amount of time and extremely easy to manage. It's auto updating and needs no tuning at all. I did an upgrade last week, and even that took less than 10 minutes. Everything is well researched and tested prior to being released.
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Did You Know?
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a ransomware attack occurs
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of all email is spam
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