Company: Hereford College of Arts
Location: Hereford, UK
Industry: Education
Number of employees: 150
Products in use: GFI MailEssentials™ for Exchange 14
Hereford College of Arts is an Art, Design and Performing Arts College in the West Midlands. Having noticed a remarkable increase in the amount of spam that was getting into the college email system and which, in turn, was detracting users from their work, Hereford College of Arts decided to implement an anti-spam solution to counter this problem. Having heard positive reviews about GFI MailEssentials they trialed it for a short period of time and installed the full version having seen the positive results that it offered.
Hereford College of Arts provides courses in Further Education and Higher Education for students wishing to study Art, Design and Performing Arts. Mr. Michael Hughes, Network Manager at Hereford College of Arts said that it was “the increasing volume of spam emails coming into the college” that prompted them to look into the possibility of installing an anti spam solution.
As Hereford College of Arts deals with numerous student enquiries via email on a daily basis, the increase in spam emails let to a greater risk of a valid email being deleted as it would have been mistaken for spam. This risk could have a detrimental effect on both the college and the students.
The problems with spam emails are multiple; they can be harmful to a workstation and network as they could contain viruses and malware, but more often than not they are merely useless emails that clog email inboxes and waste users’ time as they have to sift through their emails and determine which are authentic messages.
Realizing the potential negative effects that spam could have on the college, it was decided that investing in an anti-spam solution was necessary and Hereford College chose to install GFI MailEssentials. “We skimmed over a few alternatives initially but GFI MailEssentials seemed to be a well known solution so we just went with it”, said Mr. Hughes.
“Because we were able to use the trial version of GFI MailEssentials initially and it performed well we decided to install the full version on our network. Being a reasonably priced product was also favorable.”
The installation of GFI MailEssentials was primarily to combat the problem of spam emails overrunning users’ email inboxes, which proved to be successful as “the spam emails getting through now were of a negligible number”. Furthermore Hereford College used GFI MailEssentials to add disclaimers to all their outgoing emails and was able to manage email traffic more efficiently.
“Having a centrally controlled filter has been very useful. With emails being a difficult thing to keep on top of at the best of times the ability to filter unnecessary emails has certainly made that simpler from the end users’ perspective”, said Mr. Hughes.
The implementation of GFI MailEssentials was also successful with regard to its integration with the existing network structure of the college.
“Installation and integration with our Microsoft Exchange server has been very good and there was an immediate reduction of spam emails to end users’ mailboxes.”
The benefits that Hereford College experienced after installing GFI MailEssentials were easily identifiable as the numbers of spam emails reaching users’ email inboxes plummeted.
“It is a cost-effective solution as users no longer have to sift through spam emails, so they are now able to focus on the job at hand,” said Mr. Hughes.
Moreover, the installation of the anti-spam software has definitely saved time in terms of operations efforts because “although nothing quantifiable was assigned, the volume of spam emails coming in and being filtered has increased dramatically in the last couple of years, so for end users not to receive those will have saved many productive hours.”
Overall, it meant cleaner mailboxes and a greatly reduced risk of important student and prospective student enquiries being deleted by mistake.
“The installation of GFI MailEssentials saw an immediate reduction of spam emails to end users’ mailboxes and that has improved over time as it learns to recognize new threats.”
For more information about GFI MailEssentials visit http://www.gfi.com/mes/
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