Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches: Foothill-De Anza Community College District Achieves Spam Catch Rate Above 99 Percent

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Foothill-De Anza Community College District is one of the largest community college districts in the United States, providing credit classes for about 44,000 students per quarter. In addition, both of its colleges are active members of the League for Innovation in the Community College, a national consortium of leading two-year institutions.

The Challenge

As an academic institution, Foothill-De Anza is committed to providing an open, consensus-building environment that ensures the free exchange of ideas. Therefore, the district needed to find a way to protect email users from spam, viruses and other email attacks without blocking their access to important information.

“Our district has earned a national reputation for its innovative use of information technology in creating a dynamic learning environment for a diverse student body,” says Fred Sherman, vice chancellor and chief technology officer of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. “We envision a community where technology is current, integrated, secure, reliable and available anywhere at any time.”

In January 2004, Foothill-De Anza installed a firewall to provide anti-spam and anti-virus protection. The firewall uses pattern-detecting software to identify suspect messages and at first performed fairly well, blocking 84 percent of spam and viruses. But after three years and 75 million messages, it was clear that the stand-alone firewall could not keep up with the increased traffic or the growing sophistication of spammers. Complaints from email users began to soar, and the district decided to look for a complementary solution.

The Solution

“We wanted to test solutions that took an innovative approach instead of using the same signature-based algorithm as our current firewall,” explains Chien Shih, director of information technology for Foothill-De Anza Community College District. “Abaca’s receiver-based technology really stood out. Instead of scanning for patterns, it examines the relationships between people who exchange email. When something out of the ordinary happens, it checks for spam.”

Foothill-De Anza’s information technology (IT) team decided to test the Abaca appliance and networked service solution side-by-side with one other well-known anti-spam solution. First, they identified 26 to 30 email users to serve as the test group. Next, they established the testing methodology, which included both statistical analysis and subjective feedback, e.g., false positive rate, spam not blocked, ease of use, and subjective feedback from users.

After collecting baseline statistics, the IT team tested each anti-spam product for 30 days. At the end of each test, they collected another set of statistics, as well as user feedback, about the pros and cons of each solution. In the end, it wasn’t even close. Abaca emerged as the clear winner on all fronts.

The Results

“The statistics we got back from the Abaca test really surprised us,” recalls Shih. “Abaca’s false positive rate was 0.17 percent, and the spam not blocked rate was 0.79 percent. Less than 1 percent! The other solution we tested gave us statistical results of 1.87 percent and 2.54 percent, respectively. That’s a huge difference given the enormous amount of email coming into our district.”

The district’s test group also gave Abaca’s appliance and networked service solution superior marks for ease of use. They particularly liked Abaca’s flexible quarantine feature, which blocks questionable email, but allows users to easily retrieve any messages they want to see. Abaca’s intuitive, user-friendly interface got high marks from the test group as well.

“We purposely picked email users who would be hard to please, the ones who complained the loudest about the spam filling up their mailboxes,” says Shih. “After testing Abaca’s solution, they started sending us letters of thanks and congratulations instead of complaints.”

In addition to delivering superior performance, Abaca trounced the competition on price and total cost of ownership. Not only is Abaca’s appliance and networked service solution less expensive than the other solution Foothill-De Anza tested, it also is a self-mentoring system that updates itself automatically and requires virtually no ongoing system administration. Given the district’s limited IT budget and resources, Abaca’s dynamic teach-to-learn capability was welcome news for Shih.

Based on these impressive test results, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District decided to implement the enterprise-class Abaca EPG 3000 with ReceiverNet Premium Service alongside its existing firewall for all of the district’s faculty, staff and services personnel.

About Foothill-De Anza Community College District

Founded more than 50 years ago and located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District serves the cities of Cupertino, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Stanford, Sunnyvale, and parts of San Jose.