Freight company P&O Ferrymasters has reduced email administration by 90 per cent in three months using anti-virus and spam filtering software.

The technology, from vendor Network Defence, is saving time and money, enabling the firm to focus on core business activities.

Stephen Walters, IT director at P&O Ferrymasters, says the software is blocking 70,000 to 80,000 spam and virus emails every day.

‘My helpdesk was receiving increasing volumes of calls about wrongly intercepted mail because the system we had was not accurate enough,’ he said.

Walters says the company had reached the point where it would have needed to recruit another member of staff to deal with email quarantine administration, but the software means this is no longer necessary.

‘The technology cost £12,500 to implement and we would have had to spend £35,000 on a new member of staff,’ he said.

P&O Ferrymasters’ incoming business correspondence accounts for 80 per cent of its email and the firm can now handle 14,000 customer orders and enquiries over email every day.

Benefits include improved order processing and a rise in last-minute sales opportunities created by improved response time to customer enquiries. Disaster recovery has also benefited from functionality that enables users to access emails via a secure web portal in the event of a network outage.

Daniel Fleischer, senior analyst at researcher IDC, says email perimeter defences also protect against transmission of sensitive outbound data.

‘A company needs to protect its outbound data and sensitive and valuable customer information as well as stopping unwanted in-bound mail,’ said Fleischer.