When international real estate company Harcourts – one of Australasia’s largest real estate groups – moved to the SMX mail scrubbing service, it not only took care of their inbound spam and virus problems, but delivered an innovative and highly effective outbound email security solution.
Chief Information Officer, Jason Wills, says Harcourts was an early adopter of managed mail services and had been using a service-based solution from an SMX competitor before making the switch to SMX.
He says Harcourts made the switch to SMX for three reasons, price, redundancy and ease of use.
“We’re now saving $50,000 per year in bandwidth. That’s more than the SMX service fees. So this is the ideal business case result: we’ve solved a major spam and virus problem for our users and more than paid for the costs of that solution in savings in bandwidth costs,” says Jason Wills.
“The beauty of SMX is that it’s a ‘no touch’ solution”, he says. “Using an accurate global filter is much easier than having to manually configure spam filters for over 4,400 email users.”
With two SMX datacentres located in New Zealand, dual ISPs and dual fibre providers, Harcourts has confidence that the service will be not be interrupted by email outages and other technical delivery problems experienced by Harcourts’ previous mail and virus scrubbing service.
The user-friendly SMX interface was also a selling point for Harcourts. Users can login via the website and easily configure white and black lists and content filters.
Protecting a global reputation
Subsequent to signing up for the SMX inbound mail scrubbing service and securing their inbound email, Harcourts found they had other issues to contend with. The company has a large, increasingly mobile workforce operating over a global network – both in offices and offsite. Users send out large volumes of email daily to external recipients. With no effective measures in place to protect its outbound mail, Harcourts was exposed to spam and blacklisting.
With offices across New Zealand and Australia and in the South Pacific, China, Southern Africa and the US, Harcourts has a globally recognised brand and online reputation to safeguard.
Layers of protection
SMX helped Harcourts address potential issues and strengthen their email security policy by implementing the SMX outbound mail filtering service. Harcourts now has a comprehensive and secure mail filtering service – encompassing both inbound and outbound mail – to protect its email at a network level. The service operates as an internet-facing gateway cleaning and delivering email free of viruses, spam and other malicious content.
SMX proactively monitors the email traffic through its servers, identifying potential issues before the mail reaches the internet. An exception report is generated identifying the issue – for example, a machine attempting to send spam – and SMX can isolate and resolve the issue before it becomes a problem. Harcourts has full visibility (the same as SMX) of its account and can monitor issues and how they are dealt with.
Peace of mind
Harcourts uses the SMX IP range, so mail is relayed from a secure and trusted IP address - meaning it’s unlikely to be rejected or blacklisted by recipient servers. All mail – bulk and every day – will be safely delivered and Harcourts will not be seen to be sending spam by Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBLs).
Jason Wills says that the SMX outbound mail service has given Harcourts the peace of mind that their brand and online reputation won’t be compromised.
“SMX is really proactive – they quickly identify potential issues and employ proven technology to combat them before they become problems. With outbound mail filtering we can rest assured there will be no future issues with spam or blacklisting. It’s simple to use and effective,” he says.
