Situation
Pechanga Resort & Casino is a four diamond casino located on the Pechanga Indian Reservation in Temecula, CA and also California’s largest casino. With 1,500 email users, Gilbert Mendoza, Pechanga’s IT Security Administrator, was struggling with a spam problem that his filter wasn’t able to solve and users that were spending upwards of two hours daily maintaining their email inboxes.
Mendoza knew that something had to change, and fast, “The filter we had in place blocked some spam, but our users were still receiving up to 100 unwanted emails per day,” said Mendoza. The IT staff was also encountering a common problem with filters, “some good messages (false positives) were not getting delivered and we had to spend time finding these emails, which was very time consuming.”
Mendoza realized that the filter-based solution in place was approaching the problem the wrong way, “Every solution we had used previously handled the spam problem in the same way, by focusing on content and that’s a losing battle. We needed something different, a solution that really worked.”
Pechanga needed a solution that would give their end-users control over their inboxes. “We didn’t have control over the messages we were receiving. People were pleading for help and I wanted to provide them with a solution that really would,” said Mendoza.
Solution
Known as an innovator in both the gaming industry and as an IT organization, Pechanga selected Sendio email system protection to totally eliminate spam and email threats.
Pechanga chose the solution because unlike filters, which require ongoing maintenance but are only partially effective, Sendio’s proactive approach to email security incorporates a critical human element that brings authenticity and control to email communications. “We get used to the idea that we will always have to deal with a certain amount of spam because of filters, but it is possible to stop all of it with the Sendio solution, you just have to step outside of the box and look at the problem from a different perspective,” says Mendoza.
The solution utilizes two proprietary technologies, Sender Address Verification (SAV) and SilverListing, to block spam and viruses from reaching the inbox. SAV goes to the root of the spam problem by removing the veil of anonymity accorded to spammers by virtue of the SMTP protocol, while SilverListing uses a set of low-level SMTP tests to determine the legitimacy of the sending email server. Sendio’s solution is doubly effective because it is deployed as a hardware device that prevents spam from reaching corporate servers. In other words, there is no spam to filter because unwanted messages never make it into the system.
Results
Immediately after implementing Sendio, Mendoza saw a dramatic decrease in spam with just the SilverListing feature enabled. “We went from receiving anywhere between 60,000 and 100,000 email messages per day down to around 6,000 and sometimes as low as 3,000 in total email traffic,” he said. This elimination of nearly 90% of the organization’s malicious email traffic freed up network bandwidth but still allowed for the delivery of legitimate emails.
When they switched on the SAV component, “The spam disappeared across the board, and I was sold. Sendio worked as advertised, stopping 100% of our spam,” said Mendoza. Now Mendoza and IT personnel spend closer to 5 to 10 minutes, rather than several hours each week, managing the organization’s email.
“This has been one of my favorite projects to work on to date. I was able to deploy a solution that really worked and brought change to the organization,” says Mendoza, “I get calls and emails from the users on the system and they couldn’t be happier, they love the technology.”
