Company

The international retail company is known for showcasing the latest trends in fashion footwear and accessories. With operations across five continents and 4,600 retail stores in more than 50 countries, the company employs over 40,000 people worldwide. As an international company, their employees rely heavily on email to communicate with each other as well as with key external parties. This is no exception for employees in the Toronto headquarters: in departments ranging from Finance, Human Resources, and Legal to Systems Application Development, email is an essential form of communication.

Situation

Being an internationally known company, they are susceptible to receiving unsolicited email from around the world. According to Jamie Paris, the company’s IT Technical Support Manager, 80% of the email delivered to the company’s Toronto office were spam. On average, employees were receiving 20-30 spam emails a day. After weekends, some employees would come back to the office to find their mailboxes flooded with over 100 spam messages.

Not only were employees frustrated with the amount of spam they were receiving, but productivity of the company was also adversely affected. Employees had to spend time every morning filtering through unwanted emails to ensure they didn’t inadvertently delete legitimate messages. The company’s email system would also periodically experience down time because it was unable to handle the vast amount of unwanted traffic that passed through it. “The system had to be reset at least once or twice a week. It affected productivity in all areas of the company”, says Paris. The company needed a highly effective, accurate solution for their spam problem.

TrueMail™ Solution

To combat the problem, the company sought the help of NetPulse – the company’s Managed Security provider since 1999. NetPulse recommended its recently upgraded TrueMail™ spam and virus control solution. TrueMail™ was attractive to the company because it was highly effective against spam and was easy to use. More importantly, the company was assured that TrueMail™ received 24/7 monitoring and management by NetPulse’s spam control experts.

Based on multiple, disparate spam filtering techniques, TrueMail™ is a unique and innovative solution, designed to reduce spam with greater than 99.9% efficiency. One of the key systems deployed, is a highly evolved artificial intelligence technology, which learns from experience and user feedback, and adapts to individual user preferences.

As part of the TrueMail™ solution, NetPulse also provides the company with its LastLook® service.  This includes ongoing, 24/7 intervention and management control over the accuracy of TrueMail™. “Last Look” technicians also manually examine every message identified as spam to eliminate misclassified emails. As a result, TrueMail™ achieves exceptionally high success rates with almost zero false positives.

NetPulse’s team of experts installed TrueMail™ in the company’s Toronto office in just 30 minutes. The deployment process was completely transparent and the transition took place without any interruption to their employees’ work.

Feedback from the employees after implementation was extremely positive – they found the interface very user friendly and easy to operate. Using only a web browser, the company’s employees are able to check their spam quarantine folders, report any email that made it through the filters and create their own blacklist and whitelists of domains and email addresses.

Result

After two months of using TrueMail™, the retail company’s employees noticed a significant reduction in the amount of spam they received. Even with the extent of spam in email reaching 85-90%, TrueMail™ demonstrates high stability and reliability.

Employee productivity has also improved. Employees no longer waste time filtering out unwanted messages and they are no longer dependent on the IT department to manage their spam. This allows the IT department to focus on their core responsibilities. TrueMail™ has proved to be a highly effective solution for the company and the whole organization has noticed the difference. “When we get a system like this, all employees, including our senior executives are happy – which makes me happy”, concludes Paris.