Greenview Data Helps Howell School District Thwart Spam, Achieve Archiving and FOIA Compliance

The Client
Howell School District is the second largest employer in Livingston County, Michigan, boasting some 1700 staff members, including 451 teachers. More than 8400 students occupy its seven elementary schools, two middle schools, one freshman campus building and one high school. For a district of this size, e-mail provides a vital communications link between faculty and staff, administration and board members for daily communications, as well as for emergency situations.

The Challenge
With recent estimates on the prevalence of spam indicating that spam comprises some 95.0% of all e-mail traffic in the education sector, the nuisance of spam is amplified by the sheer number of users on the Howell network. The network resources, time and energy consumed in dealing with the spam nuisance had become a burden on the school district’s Microsoft Exchange server and other IT resources. IT Director Paul Pominville says the problem had become a security issue as well, with users naively clicking on links in suspect e-mails and subscribing to mailing lists with little regard for the security implications.

Meanwhile, the district’s e-mail archiving needs had begun to quickly outpace its existing solutions. With a legal requirement for archiving all communications, as well as a need to retrieve data to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Pominville had been essentially manually archiving e-mail data with in-house equipment. As dependence on e-mail grew, so too did the volume of e-mail data for archiving.

The Solution
After reading an article in the Ann Arbor News about Greenview Data and its award-winning SpamStopsHere hosted spam filtering solution, Pominville implemented the service on a trial basis, replacing his open source solutions that weren’t quite making the cut. With the industry’s most accurate spam filter, SpamStopsHere immediately cut the number of e-mails delivered to the Howell server by 98%, an indication of just how much spam was coming their way.

Pleased with the SpamStopsHere service, Pominville has recently implemented Greenview Data’s RestorEmail Email Archiving Edition in Howell Schools to provide infinite e-mail archiving and storage of every sent/received e-mail, up to 1 GB per user.

The Result
“The biggest advantage for me is that it is out of my hands. It’s one less thing I have to worry about because I know they have the expertise to handle it and do it so well,” Pominville said. “Because we don’t have to manage it here, it frees up our resources to handle other day-to-day IT needs, and gives us the peace of mind in knowing that if something should go wrong on the e-mail server, we will be able to maintain full operations because of the webmail access and server pass through.”

As an added bonus, Pominville has discovered that by using RestorEmail’s ability to hold mail for delivery, he can even use it to schedule mail holds for maintenance windows on the server. While the server is down, senders do not receive delivery failure notices, and mail is delivered automatically as soon as the work is completed and the hold is lifted.

For FOIA compliance, RestorEmail fully meets the district’s response requirements by allowing officials to quickly and easily access historical communication records when needed. The service also provides an additional level of disaster recovery preparedness, both in terms of IT disaster and other threats.

“Because safety is a major issue at each of our facilities, it’s important that we be able to maintain communications in the event of an emergency,” Pominville said. “Not only could I use it to rebuild a mail server in the event of a catastrophic failure, but I can also provide the superintendent with a secure web interface to send and receive e-mails, even from an off-site location.”

Finally, Pominville says he’s been so impressed with Greenview Data’s solutions that he has recommended them to several colleagues, one of whom was so pleased that he rewarded Pominville with a dining gift certificate to show his appreciation.