Law firm Addleshaw Goddard claims to have saved 1,800 hours
a month by regaining lost productivity after upgrading its
anti-spam system.
The law firm invested in an anti-spam service from Tumbleweed after
seeing an increase in the number of spam e-mails that penetrated
its defences during the preceding six months.
The growing sophistication of spammers, who are increasingly using
tricks such as inserting full stops and other symbols into words to
fool filtering systems, meant that some partners were receiving
between 74 and 100 spam e-mails a day.
"We calculated, on average, that people spent five minutes a day
dealing with spam messages," said Dan Simms IT technical services
manager.
The law firm had been using Tumbleweed's EMS anti-virus and spam
filtering gateway, running on a Hewlett-Packard Windows 2003 server
to provide a basic spam filtering service and check for viruses
carried by e-mail.
"It has been very effective over the past few years -spamat keeping
down the spam levels," said Simms. "But we have had to create rules
to capture specific messages. The problem is that the messages that
are coming through are more intelligent."
The company looked at several anti-spam services, including
external anti-spam filtering services run by Messagelabs and
Blackspider, before deciding to upgrade its Tumbleweed
system.
Simms said the Tumbleweed subscription-based anti-spam service
provided better control of spam, and offered the company greater
flexibility because it used hardware based on-site rather than a
managed service.
Addleshaw Goddard has also modified its network to eliminate
administration e-mails sent by its anti-virus systems and fax
gateway services, which also wasted staff time.
The service, which runs on Addleshaw Goddard's existing HP mail
server, allows employees to view a list of spam e-mails that have
been intercepted by the system, and if necessary retrieve them, to
ensure that no important messages have been blocked accident