Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches Featuring Cloudmark and Sohu.com

By Messaging News staff
in

China’s No. 1 Web portal, Sohu.com is the top ranking email service provider in China. With a large user base, Sohu was challenged by large volumes of unwanted messages, including new waves of foreign language (mostly English) spam, clogging its messaging system. This caused strains on its infrastructure as well as growing operational costs. Additionally, Sohu experienced spam issues resulting from computers in its network that were compromised by hackers and were being used, unknowingly, to send spam messages from Sohu domains. This abuse led other email service providers to blacklist some Sohu IP addresses and prevent delivery of messages sent by Sohu subscribers. All of these challenges became especially critical during the Olympic Games in Beijing. It was well known that spammers and hackers would likely use the Olympics as a prime opportunity to attack enterprise and personal mailboxes and that users in China would face unusually high volumes of Game-related spam messages. As the official sponsor of Internet Content Service for the Beijing Olympic Games, Sohu knew that tens of millions of its email subscribers could be victims of spam outbreaks during the Olympics.

Following an extensive testing phase, Sohu selected Cloudmark, Inc’s Cloudmark Authority due to its high accuracy, ease of use, manageability, and ability to scale to meet the needs of Sohu’s large user-base. Sohu deployed the solution prior to the start of the Olympic Games. “Since implementing Cloudmark, Sohu has experienced immediate and significant resource savings in the areas of CPU, storage, Internet network resources, administrative and customer support,” says Qiu Yingbo of Sohu. “Our decision to deploy Cloudmark has resulted in a significant improvement in subscriber satisfaction and enhancement of our company brand.”

Published December 5, 2008