Montreal real estate firm cans spam with Google Message Security

Canderel was swamped with a deluge of spam - 95 per cent of all e-mail - and its business hamstrung before Google Message Security came along. The spam-filter offers detailed end-user tweaking and comes well-priced.
12/22/2008 6:00:00 AM By: Brian Jackson

IT director Lance LeBlanc balks at the notion that he would ever even consider turning off his Google Message Security spam filter – to do so would overwhelm his 250 employee real estate company with a daily mass of e-mails a company of 10,000 might receive.

Montreal-based real estate firm Canderel reached its tipping point in 2004, when it was receiving on average between 200 and 300 spam messages a day. With the business communications hamstrung as a result of the problem, LeBlanc sought out the services of Postini, a company that provided a hosted service promising to filter out the spam and let through legitimate e-mails.

It took just two days to put the new service into place and Canderel immediately stopped receiving spam, LeBlanc recalls. He hasn't looked back since.

“I don't even want to imagine what would happen if I turned off Google today,” he says.

Google acquired Postini on Sept. 13, 2007 and has rebranded the company's services under its Google Apps for Enterprise line. If there have been changes made to the service since then, LeBlanc hasn't noticed.

“They did a good job of transitioning,” he says. “It was transparent and there was zero downtime.”

Cases like Canderel are commonplace these days, with corporate e-mail servers overburdened by the deluge of spam messages received. A hosted, or cloud, option such as that offered by Google is an appealing way to shift that burden off of the IT department and free up company resources. Google's system gives end-users the tools needed to control how discriminating their spam filter works, freeing IT workers from configuration duties.

Many companies are wary of cloud-based services, with the thought of corporate data residing with a third-party raising security and privacy concerns. But Google addresses that problem with a “pass-through architecture” that doesn't store the legitimate e-mail messages being sent to the company – it scans messages as they're being sent directly to the company.

Companies like Canderel are embracing the cloud because of its ability to take the burden of spam off the back of the company's network, says Adam Swidler, product marketing manager with Google.

“Don't let spam consume any bandwidth or storage,” says the former Postini employee. “It makes sense to put your security screens in the cloud, directly in the path between the malware and your organization.”

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