Integrated e-mail security and data loss prevention provider, Proofpoint, Inc. has announced that the City of Fresno, California has deployed the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway (News - Alert) appliance to protect its employees from incoming spam and viruses.

Proofpoint blocks an average of 80,000 incoming spam messages a day for the City of Fresno, stopping nearly all spam right at the enterprise gateway.

The City of Fresno sought a more comprehensive messaging security solution to keep pace with the onslaught of unsolicited spam messages. The organization needed an easy-to-deploy appliance that would effectively block new inbound e-mail threats as they appeared, that also required little to no ongoing maintenance.

With the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, the City of Fresno was provided with a unified solution for spam and virus protection. The city also reported that it was impressed with the outstanding accuracy of the solution.

Proofpoint Spam Detection is powered by patent-pending Proofpoint MLX machine learning technology. This module examines hundreds of thousands of attributes in every e-mail to provide complete protection against the latest spam techniques, including image-based, PDF-based and foreign language spam.

Immediately upon deploying the appliance, Proofpoint blocked between 80,000 and 120,000 spam messages a day, without any instances of false positives, eliminating unwanted messages from employee inboxes.

"We were impressed with Proofpoint's Web-based administration, easily personalized end-user controls and plug and play deployment," said Raj Nagra, senior network systems specialist with the City of Fresno, in a Wednesday statement.

"Proofpoint has proven to be the ideal messaging security solution for us because it delivers near-perfect accuracy with almost zero maintenance requirements -- the appliance runs itself."

Proofpoint Virus Protection module is also used by the City of Fresno to protect the company from all types of viruses, worms and other malicious code delivered via e-mail. As Proofpoint offers convenient, centralized administration of anti-virus policies from the same interface used to manage spam policies, the City of Fresno is provided a single platform from which to monitor all spam and virus filtering activities.

"As spamming techniques continue to gain sophistication and virus writers adopt new methods of bypassing anti-virus engines, organizations must have the proper protection in place to anticipate and proactively fend off the latest threats," said Sandra Vaughan, senior vice president of products and marketing of Proofpoint, in Wednesday’s statement.

"Proofpoint provides organizations of all sizes with robust, easy to manage, up to date protection that blocks even never-before-seen spam and virus attacks."

While any organization that utilizes e-mail capabilities is at risk for viruses that can be attached to inbound e-mails, the bigger problem could actually be the time wasted trying to weed through spam e-mails. Research has shown that companies can lose literally millions of dollars in lost productivity just in employee time spent deleting unwanted e-mails to get to business-related communications.

Therefore, a solution that can do the sorting before e-mails ever reach an employee is worth the investment. When considering an organization like the City of Fresno that is operating on a public and limited budget, the Proofpoint solution will deliver much needed improvements in productivity as well as protection from malicious e-mail.


Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.