Case Study - The Thistle Foundation
Organization: The Thistle Foundation
Location: Edinburgh, UK
Industry: Charity
No. of Employees: 250
Products in Use: GFI MailEssentials™ & GFI MailArchiver™
Quick read
The Thistle Foundation is a charity organization in the UK that provides individually tailored services that are designed to support disabled people and those with long term health conditions to lead full and active lives. The Foundation uses the internet extensively to promote its cause and soon started noticing an increase in the volume of spam and junk mail it was receiving. To tackle this problem the foundation installed GFI MailEssentials. Also aware of the importance of having a record of all email correspondence, the Foundation chose GFI MailArchiver. Both deals were closed on the basis of product quality but also GFI’s competitive pricing strategy for charities.
Challenges
As a charity organization The Thistle Foundation depends a great deal on publicity to promote their cause and generate awareness. The charity uses a number of email addresses that are visible on various sites. While this has increased their reach, the use of various public email addresses resulted in the Foundation’s email server being hit by a lot of spam and junk mail.
As the volume of spam increased, the charity’s servers’ performance was affected. It was also proving a nuisance for employees to have to clean their inbox of spam and other junk mail they were receiving. Apart from a waste of time there was also the risk that genuine emails could be missed and deleted in the process. Tackling email spam became an urgent matter for the Foundation.
The Thistle Foundation also wanted to ensure that valid emails were not getting lost or deleted but were being stored in a central location and were easily retrievable when needed.
Richard Thomas, IT Manager of the Foundation, said: “As a number of our email addresses are in the public domain we were up to our ears in spam. Also we required a complete backup of all emails sent and received.”
Being a charity organization, funds are always an issue, and although Mr. Thomas had looked into other software products, he decided to install GFI’s anti-spam and archiving software because “charity pricing is very competitive”. Moreover “GFI produce products are recognized as industry standards” which gave him the peace of mind to install them.
Implementation
The Thistle Foundation required a product that is easy to install and requires little maintenance: “Both GFI MailEssentials and GFI MailArchiver were very easy to install, they’ve both been reliable and required little maintenance,” Mr. Thomas said.
Since the implementation of GFI MailEssentials a positive decrease was seen in the amount of spam that The Thistle Foundation received, even though spam levels remained the same. The results seen were instantaneous and contributed to a more positive user experience throughout the Foundation. As Mr. Thomas pointed out, the “massive reduction in spam led to fewer complaints from users!”
The implementation of GFI MailArchiver was equally successful and now The Thistle Foundation was compliant with legislation concerning email storage. “Users knew that all their emails were being stored and could easily be recovered for e-discovery requests or researching the history of emails in the event of new users joining the team and taking over from other people,” he said.
Benefits
What tipped the scales? According to Mr. Thomas, GFI’s “very competitive charity pricing” helped The Thistle Foundation to decide which products to install.
From a technology perspective, he said the benefits of installing anti-spam software were that security threats associated with spam were greatly reduced as malware and other malicious material that is found in spam or attachments were no longer delivered to users’ mailboxes. Furthermore the decrease in spam meant an increase in production time as users could concentrate on replying to and handling the important emails in their mailbox instead of having to sift through and delete spam.
Mr. Thomas stated that “freedom from spam” was the greatest benefit realized after installing this product.
The Thistle Foundation also discovered that the advantages of having GFI MailArchiver were two-fold; on both a legal level and a user level.
“They are able to have a complete back-up of all their emails which can be easily searched and recovered in a short time and without major hassles should there be an e-discovery request.
“Being able to retrieve any email from an archive means we are more compliant with legislation. It’s also useful when there is an investigation in progress. Being able to retrieve archived email easily using a web browser is a great boon,” said Mr. Thomas.
Target Reached
“Implementing GFI products has led to freedom from spam and less technical support calls to deal with the problems of phishing, hoax emails and full inboxes.”
Links
For more information about GFI MailArchiver and GFI MailEssentials visit: http://www.gfi.cz/mailarchiver/ and http://www.gfi.cz/mes/ respectively.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
April 2009