How iHouse Web Eradicated Email Spam with SpamTitan

IHOUSE Web’s customers had been seeing the level of spam messages increasing steadily, spam and all the damaging consequences it brings was leaking through the hosted email filtering service to customers inboxes.

SpamTitan has saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars per month in unnecessary service calls and lost customers.

Alan Aldrich

IT Manager

The Email Spam Challenge Faced by IHOUSEWEB

  • IHOUSEWEBs customers had been seeing the level of spam messages increasing steadily. Spam and all the damaging consequences it brings was leaking through the hosted email filtering service to customers inboxes.
  • IHOUSEWEB Inc has always prided itself of the level of care it provides to its customers. “We found with the increasing levels of spam and related incidents, we were getting more and more support calls from unhappy customers.
  • We realised this could not continue and began looking for an anti spam solution that guaranteed results.
  • Web hosting is our business and email is very important to our customers, we were reaching the point where our current anti spam solutions’ inadequacies was causing us to lose customers which was totally unacceptable” said Alan Aldrich, IT Manager.
  • A key requirement for ISPs that are hosting email is the ability to detect and stop zombie PCs.
  • Our previous solution was not preventing botnets on our network. The situation began to threaten our service delivery so seriously that the only option we had was to find a new solution that worked comprehensively in our ISP environment.
  • IHOUSEWEB Inc invested considerable money and time in adopting the Mail Foundry Spam Filtering appliances and spent literally years attempting to work with the solution but with no success.
  • The previous solution did not deliver on its promise of close to zero false positives including the promise of very little spam due to their supposed advantage of ‘human generated’ spam filter rules.

The Solution for Email Spam

  • “When we first started using SpamTitan there was a lot of spam messages coming through our servers and ultimately reaching our customers inboxes but within a few days of deploying SpamTitan these had dropped significantly and our false positive rate which had been a big problem also dropped significantly ,” said Mr Aldrich.
  • After a few days of Bayesian training, the evaluation devices had already learned sufficiently to start rejecting and accepting with exceptional accuracy.
  • This coupled with the very flexible configuration of RBLS, RFC and sender compliance settings, in addition to some clever add-ons such as client OS identification made the decision easy – SpamTitan was the solution IHOUSEWEB had been looking for all along.
  • A big benefit of SpamTitan to this ISP was the ease of setting up SpamTitan. SpamTitan has a very intuitive user interface and incorporated end user quarantines and automatic updating, making it a virtually administration-free solution.
  • In addition to its ease of use and deployment, SpamTitan offered IHOUSEWEB a full set of features specifically designed for ISPs, these features allow the IT administrator to determine how stringently email will be blocked.
  • The SpamTitan Engineering team worked closely with IHOUSEWEB’s in enabling them to make a seamless migration from Mail Foundry.
  • According to Aldrich ‘It was easy for us to implement several API calls from external scripts to upload all of our domains and standard policies to the appliance and the clustering worked perfectly to roll out the uploaded information from the cluster master to the slaves. On the day that we went live, we just had to change the MX records to point to the SpamTitans and off we went.’
  • No hardware costs with the virtual appliance – Great value for the price compared to other alternatives

The Result: Email Spam Eradicated

Following the 14-day trial, IHOUSEWEB purchased an unlimited SpamTitan license that was set up to filter email and stop inbound spam and block the increasing number of viruses and malware hitting the network. The improvements in terms of email flow and reduction is spam and viruses was immediate.

A better solution was needed

We finally gave up and started looking for an alternative solution to manage spam for our 8000+ domains in our web hosting business

Up and running quickly and easily

Our 30 Day Free Trial translated into Immediate Results

Highly Scaleable

IHOUSE offer web hosting and IT infrastructure to their customer base of over 30,000 real estate professionals which they will be growing.