Maxed Out On Spam

As a high-profile company with thousands of employees and millions of e-mail messages streaming into its network on a daily basis, OfficeMax takes spam very seriously. The ever-growing volume and resulting threats from phishing, directory-harvest attacks and the like made managing spam a critically important, but time-consuming, effort for the Itasca, Ill.-based office-supply giant.

Sean Power, lead IT security engineer at OfficeMax, says his team was spending roughly 60 hours each week administering the company's previous spam product, the Clearswift MailSweeper.

"It was letting a lot of spam through, and it was extremely intensive on controlling what spam was blocked and what wasn't," Power says.

In addition, Power explains that spam in general was having a serious effect on OfficeMax; the sheer volume was bogging down its servers and, in turn, slowing down the network and lowering the productivity of employees, who were receiving the spam and then having to sift through and delete it. Power knew he had to find a better solution for managing the growing spam problem.

"We wanted a product that was easier," he says.

Coincidentally, at the same time Power was out in the field evaluating new e-mail products for controlling spam, he received a cold call from Palo Alto, Calif.-based MailFrontier, a provider of e-mail-security solutions. Power was intrigued with its products, so MailFrontier suggested nearby Cleveland-based reseller MRK Technologies to follow up.

MRK had done work previously with OfficeMax, but not within the security group that Power oversees. During initial conversations, MRK heard about OfficeMax's challenges with e-mail, what the company was looking to achieve and how it wanted to go about it.

For example, because of security concerns, OfficeMax wanted e-mail to still go directly to the company to be cleaned through. Ultimately, MRK presented several solutions from different vendors to OfficeMax, and the MailFrontier product was chosen.

"We came in and talked through whether they wanted the solution in-house or completely outsourced and what level of user impact they would be able to tolerate," says John Tookman, account executive at MRK Technologies. "The outcome was that MailFrontier would align most closely to their objectives."

For example, Power points out the different needs of OfficeMax's retail department vs. the corporate side.

"Our retail stores sell cellphones so, in that sense, we want to be able to see spam related to cellphones and to see what competitors might be doing," Power says. "But when a store associate is checking e-mail on the network, it is vital that we keep pornography and other objectionable material out."

The MailFrontier Gateway Appliance allows OfficeMax to control e-mail with a centralized administrative console for quarantine, systems management and reporting across the network. To help reduce administrative maintenance, the appliance enables auto-updates of all data and software. It also offers group and end-user management with specific rules for the organization--from groups down to the mailbox level--and can also delegate administrative privileges to groups or end users. The end user is presented with a "junk box," Tookman says, from which they can control their spam quarantine--either releasing messages or deleting them altogether.

Proactive Steps

MRK was brought in to set up the MailFrontier evaluation units and coordinate the product test evaluation.

"We got some power users set up in the test environment--employees who typically receive a lot of spam--and got good feedback from them, so we decided to go forward," Power says.

Tookman says the test group began to see a positive impact on the fight against spam with the MailFrontier product right away.

"There was concern about users seeing a new e-mail junk box with a summary of spam and whether that would lead to increased help-desk calls," Tookman adds.

But Tookman and his team worked with OfficeMax to prevent that onslaught before it could become a problem. Together, they developed the appropriate communications to be shared with users to explain the new views and how they would help.

"There was an e-mail that went out to everyone to show them what they would be seeing with the new solution and how simple it was to use," Tookman says.

OfficeMax selected four MailFrontier Gateway Appliance M500s to be implemented at its network perimeter. The MailFrontier product was appealing to Power because it was "extremely easy to use" and let different departments set up different definitions of spam.

In practice, OfficeMax deployed the four devices on its network at two separate corporate locations--two in its Shaker Heights, Ohio, offices and two in the Itasca offices. Through its network, OfficeMax currently administers approximately 10,000 employee e-mail boxes, which are touched by the MailFrontier product. Power estimates that OfficeMax's e-mail is 50 percent spam, with the product blocking approximately 200,000 spam messages per day.

Power and his team cut administration time down from 60 hours per week to about two hours per week when the solution was first implemented; now that's currently down to less than 30 minutes per week.

"Users can call the help desk, and the help desk is very good with the user interface," Power says. "It's a massive improvement; very few problems come to the administrators. It allows our administrators to work on more project-oriented business tasks, and everyone is more productive as a result."