Algonquin College Dramatically Reduces E-mail Spam, Viruses and Help Desk Calls with CanIt-PRO

College's ITS department saves time and money as 35,000 students and staff set their own preferences for dealing with junk e-mail.

Ottawa, Canada (PRWEB) September 23 2003--Algonquin College has evaluated and selected CanIt-PRO to stop spam e-mail and to protect its campuses from e-mail-borne viruses. CanIt-PRO is an industry-leading anti-spam solution from Roaring Penguin Software, Inc., makers of the acclaimed MIMEDefang email inspection software.

Barry Brock, Director if Information Technology Services (ITS) at Algonquin College explains, "We needed a solution that stopped spam, stopped viruses and allowed end users to set their own e-mail filtering preferences. We chose CanIt-PRO because of its ability to meet those criteria in a user-friendly way for students and staff."

Algonquin College has deployed CanIt-PRO, the professional version of CanIt, which enables the ITS department to decentralize spam management so that individual departments and users can tailor spam policies to their specific needs.

Brock confirmed, Allowing users to change their spam settings is key. CanIt-PRO's flexibility lets students and staff choose the level of e-mail protection they feel is most appropriate."

After implementing CanIt-PRO, Algonquin College discovered that over 40% of e-mail messages coming into the college mail system are spam. Having the ability to block those messages is of great benefit to the College," says Brock.

Algonquin College's ITS department has also benefited from a reduction in calls to the help desk. Rod Martin, Algonquin Colleges Manager of Network Infrastructure, notes that before introducing CanIt-PRO, users were receiving up to 100 spam messages per day. Our help desk was getting calls from users asking how they could stop spam," explains Martin, and we were sending out up to 10 technicians per day to repair faculty machines that were infected by e-mail-borne viruses. Since putting CanIt-PRO into production, we've seen the number of calls and the need for technical support drop significantly."

Through CanIt's simple, web-based interface, end users may simply select from among four levels of spam filtering pre-defined by the ITS department, or can use an expert interface to customize their own settings using white lists and blacklists. The expert interface also allows users to view the contents of their spam traps, ensuring that no legitimate e-mail is ever discarded without consent.

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About Roaring Penguin

Founded in 1999, Roaring Penguin Software Inc. specializes in providing intelligent computing infrastructure for enterprises. Since 2000, the company has focused on enterprise e-mail filtering, spam fighting and related product lines. Today, Roaring Penguin develops, deploys and supports a range of acclaimed mail-filtering and networking products. For more information visit www.roaringpenguin.com. A trial version of CanIt can be obtained at www.canit.ca/evaluation.php.

About Algonquin College

Located in the Nations Capital and the Ottawa Valley, Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology is the third-largest of the 24 colleges in Ontario with over 120 post-secondary programs and 14,000 full-time students. Algonquin College ranked first this year in student satisfaction in the Ontario College system. Algonquin Colleges vision is to become the leading Canadian College, recognized nationally for academic excellence, committed to a client-centered culture and integration of technology into all aspects of the learning landscape. www.algonquincollege.com