London estate agent fights spam

Estate agent The Acorn Group has implemented an email security system to counter soaring costs and ineffective security as it expands operations across south-east London and Kent.

Despite using an email filtering service, 20 per cent of the company’s 100,000 inbound emails each month were spam. This amounted to an hour daily spent manually filtering emails, costing the company an estimated £20,000 in lost productivity per year.

The firm's expansion programme, combined with publicly-available email addresses on its web site and through media campaigns, meant securing the IT network from internet threats and keeping costs down were the main drivers for the project.

‘We were looking at replacing our existing ISP because it was too costly and a bad licensing model,’ said Acorn IT manager Adam Yates .

‘We wanted a pricing model with a fixed fee not dependent on the number of users or domains as we are consistently growing our business,’ he said.

The Acorn Group has 30 offices across south-east London and Kent, with 300 users.

‘We have six or seven different brands across the group so a lot of us have four or five email addresses and our existing supplier wanted to charge us per email address rather than user,’ said Yates.

Since implementing the security suite two months ago, the company has stopped 20,000 spam emails from entering its network, 4,000 malicious intrusion attacks and blocked more than 8,000 requests each month to unauthorised websites.

Yates says the system, provided by Network Box, is built with Linux sitting on the perimeter behind the ISP’s router.

‘We use it to scan emails and URLs for malicious web pages, spyware, Trojans and viruses so it pretty much does all of our perimeter security for us,’ he said.

Yates says implementation was trouble free as the hardware comes with pre-installed software and did not require any integration.

‘The only implementation challenge was the system had to be tailored to three different levels of internet access rights for employees,’ said Yates.

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Further reading:

US firms under fire for spamming children

Social sites open door to malware