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Abaca Brings Spam Filtering to 12 PA Districts

By: Dian Schaffhauser

6/9/2008

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Twelve school districts in Northeast Pennsylvania will be using the Abaca Technology Email Protection Gateway appliance after testing by BLaST Intermediate Unit (IU) 17. BLaST is an education service agency that delivers services to 19 school districts and 36,000 students.

Since BLaST is a large education service agency with a public mission, the email addresses of many of its departments and employees are public as well, making them targets for spam. Over a five-year period, BLaST tried several e-mail filters. As time progressed, they had only marginal success in blocking spam. Some e-mail users were receiving hundreds of spam messages every day.

Jon Paulhamus, assistant director of technology, did a Google search that led him to the Abaca Email Protection Gateway. After installing and configuring the service, he said, "Our spam problem went away immediately. Within 48 hours email users started coming up and thanking me for eliminating all the spam from their mailboxes.... The administrator dashboard showed that we were getting 6,000 to 15,000 spam messages an hour--in one district alone. And all of that spam is now effectively blocked by Abaca."

The Abaca gateway integrates hardware and software to detect spam, viruses, phishing, invalid bounces, spyware e-mail attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and directory harvest attacks. A component of the gateway, ReceiverNet Service, examines each user based on how much spam he or she receives and uses that data to rate incoming message flow. The company claims a 99 percent spam catch rate and near-zero false positives. The appliance is priced from $1,495 to $6,495. The ReceiverNet Service is priced from $0.60 per user per month.


Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.