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PineApp Mail-SeCure Anti-Spam Appliance Speeds up E-mail Delivery for Atlanta Realtors

Agents No Longer Wait up to 12 Hours for Messages to Reach Their Inboxes

If you're looking to buy or sell a home or commercial property in the metro Atlanta area, chances are you'll come across Metro Brokers. One of the nation's largest full service real estate companies and the world's largest GMAC Real Estate franchise, Metro Brokers has more than 3,000 sales associates and 200 support staff members in its 23 offices across metro Atlanta and northern Georgia.

	AT-A-GLANCE
	Challenge: To cost effectively replace a bogged down Barracuda anti-spam gateway with an alternative solution capable of efficiently and reliably filtering upwards of 500,000 e-mails per day for a large real estate firm. Solution: Replace the Barracuda unit with a pair of PineApp Mail-SeCure 5040 anti-spam appliances. Benefits: Significantly less expensive than competing high-capacity solutions, with no per user pricing Capable of efficiently handling high-volume e-mail traffic Easy deployment and low maintenance Extremely accurate with very few false negatives Easily searchable quarantine logs

As with any large organization, thousands of employees translates to thousands of e-mail users. And where there are e-mail accounts, spam is never far away. Today, Metro Brokers hosts approximately 3,500 e-mail accounts that receive approximately of 500,000 incoming e-mails per day. Of those, roughly 91% are considered spam.

To combat the spam, Metro Brokers previously employed a Barracuda anti-spam gateway. Although this solution was in place for about two and a half years, it became increasingly bogged down and unable to efficiently handle the load. Explained network administrator Brady Doll, "While Barracuda claimed that this unit was rated to handle a million e-mails per day, in reality it struggled to work for just half of that. E-mail queues would be so backed up that our agents often waited as many as 12 hours for important messages to get through. In this business, that can often mean the difference between winning a deal and losing it."

Tasked to find a better solution, Doll embarked on an Internet search that led him to several possible alternatives, including the MailSeCure anti-spam appliance from PineApp reseller RADirect and a comparable solution from Cisco/IronPort.

Doll evaluated each solution on his network and although both performed well, he preferred the Mail-SeCure's interface and found its quarantine logs easier to navigate.

But it was the pricing disparity that shocked him most. "IronPort charges per user, and they wanted $130,000 for one hardware unit and licensing. RADirect's pricing for the Mail-SeCure was much more inline with my budget, with no per-user fees. In the end, we bought the Mail-SeCure for just over a tenth of what IronPort wanted, and it turned out to be a much better solution."

Getting the Mail-SeCure up and running was a smooth and simple operation. "RADirect had already pre-configured the unit with our IP addresses, so all I really had to do was set up the LDAP. The few questions I had during the process were answered quickly, so there were no real issues."
Using it has been easy, too. Doll especially likes the low maintenance, LDAP integration, the fact that he doesn't have to add as many rules to the Mail-SeCure as he did with the Barracuda, and the extended backlogging. "We've only had a few false negatives, and it was very easy to go back and locate the quarantined e-mail. While the Barracuda only kept about one day's worth of backlogs, we can go back four or five days with the Mail-SeCure."

Doll adds, "Competing agencies and even former employees often attempt to recruit our agents via e-mail. The Mail-SeCure lets us block individual e-mail addresses to all but a designated group. We'll also start using the subject blocking feature soon, which I think will be really useful."

Because Metro Brokers has redundant e-mail servers, they also wanted to have redundant anti-spam appliances. Thus, their completed deployment consists of dual Mail-SeCure 5040 anti-spam appliances with the secondary one used for failover purposes.

Doll is impressed with the service he has received from both RADirect and PineApp. "One day we had an unusually large queue and I suspected a potential problem. When I called PineApp, they were already aware of, and working on, the issue. It's nice that they monitor their systems so closely."

And while he doesn't anticipate a need for additional Mail-SeCure anti-spam appliances in the near future, he appreciates their scalability. "When volume increases, it will be nice to just be able to add in an additional unit."