While email users at the Science Museum of Minnesota dealt with the problem of spam email on a daily basis, it was the increasingly offensive nature of the content of those emails that ultimately prompted them to demand an anti-spam solution.

"We only heard about spam when people had big problems with it," says Joel Miles, the museum’s network software support specialist. "People sort of lived with it, cleaning spam out of their mail boxes for 10 or 15 minutes each day. But when they started to get a lot of offensive emails, that triggered complaints so we began to look for a solution."

Two requirements were key in Miles’ decision to use CanIt PRO: control over the system and the ability to integrate it into a non-standard email environment.

When Control is King

"We looked at various anti-spam solutions," Miles remembers, "but most of the others were hosted by the vendor company. We didn’t want our mail being routed through third-party servers; we needed to control how our mail flows."

After evaluating it on a trial basis, Miles chose CanIt-PRO, which gives him complete control over both the software and the email environment. CanIt now filters all the museum’s incoming email from its location on a Sunfire v100 server running Solaris 9.

But end-user control was also a concern. "There’s so many different skill levelshere," Miles explains, "and also people in a lot of different positions some people want to receive email newsletters, for example, while others don’t want them at all. We needed the users to be able to customize their own blackslists."

Miles reports that his users are pleased with the control that CanIt provides. They like that they can easily dispose of messages without having to deal with them. And they don’t have to come to us all the time to modify the blacklists for them.

Seamless Integration

Also key in Miles’ decision was that CanIt provided a flexible solution that would run on the box of his choice. "We have two mail servers and a non-standard routing scheme here," Mile explains. "We needed something that we could customize and make changes to quickly. CanIt-PRO fit seamlessly into our network infrastructure and authentication system and has drastically cut down on the amount of spam making it into our mailboxes."

Miles is equally impressed with the support he’s received from Roaring Penguin Software: "The support we’ve received from Roaring Penguin has been very fast and very responsive."


About the Science Museum of Minnesota
Type: Museum
Number of mailboxes: ~400
Amount of spam trapped by CanIt:25% of all incoming mail,
initially 22% after turning on the CanIt ?Hit-and-Run? automatic rejection feature

Email Environment and Use
Publishes email addresses on web site
Uses email for internal and external correspondence
Mail servers: CanIt runs on Sunfire v100 running Solaris 9 filtering all incoming mail; a second server is used for virus filtering

CanIt Results
CanIt fit seamlessly into nonstandard mail routing environment
Users are pleased with ability to easily control their own whitelists and blacklists
System administrators do not have to update filters on behalf of users\
Eliminated complaints from email users