Zérospam

One Saturday evening in the spring of 2007, a ZEROSPAM technician receives an urgent call. The email gateway of a large firm with 500 employees, which recently subscribed to ZEROSPAM, goes down. Although this malfunction is in no way related to ZEROSPAM's system, our technicians spend the entire evening doing tests and helping the client (who prefers to remain anonymous).

On Monday morning, employees return to work, but the email is still not working. The situation is now critical. ZEROSPAM offers to configure temporary mailboxes on its servers so senior managers can access their email. In 30 minutes, the mailboxes are ready and the client can process urgent messages. ZEROSPAM offers to provide on-site technical assistance. The client accepts. Two experts from one of ZEROSPAM's partner firms arrive within an hour. By the end of the day, the entire service is finally restored.

The way this important client sees it, the ZEROSPAM team was fully available - even in the middle of the weekend - to solve a problem that had nothing to do with the filtering solution. This helped to establish trust and build a long-term relationship between both companies.

At the beginning of January 2007, Desjardins Ducharme, a large law firm specializing in commercial law, is looking for an alternative to its current anti-spam solution, which requires way too much management and has a high rate of false positives. The network administrator wants an effective, time-saving solution that decreases the spam's burden on available bandwidth. Desjardins Ducharme's IT consultant recommends ZEROSPAM, so the firm signs up for the 30-day free trial.

After activating the service, ZEROSPAM recommends that the client activate firewall rules restricting incoming traffic to email coming from ZEROSPAM servers. The particular configuration of Desjardins Ducharme's servers make what is otherwise a very simple process more complex and time-consuming. ZEROSPAM works with Desjardins Ducharme's consultant to solve the problem and activate the firewall rules.

Due to the high rate of false positives generated by its former anti-spam solution, Desjardins Ducharme's network administrator had compiled a lengthy whitelist. Importing this list to ZEROSPAM's management console poses problems. It should be pointed out that the lawyers' time is extremely valuable and they have very little tolerance for false positives. Over time, the customer slowly begins to trust ZEROSPAM, so they gradually eliminate unnecessary entries on their whitelist.

After six weeks, during which time ZEROSPAM filters 1,150,000 spam messages, the network administrator is thoroughly satisfied and completely reassured of the confidentiality of their communications. Email users no longer complain about problems and there are no more crises due to false positives. The client saves about 21.5GB per week in bandwidth (91% of connections were unwanted), and the ZEROSPAM anti-spam solution requires little or no management.

In January 2006, a global leader in Web hosting finds itself in hot water. It hosts the email of a client (who prefers to remain anonymous) whose domain is under attack. This telecommunications company receives about 10,000 spam emails per hour, so the Web host wants to run for the hills. The company's former email hosting provider simply turned its back on them because their spam flood burdened their bandwidth. Although both Web hosts provided anti-spam solutions, they could not adequately manage such a large quantity of spam. The client grows anxious. Who will agree to host them? The second Web host calls ZEROSPAM to the rescue.

ZEROSPAM is activated the very same day. At a moment's notice, the Web host is relieved, and spam is stopped in its tracks. To help the client reduce the volume of spam they receive, ZEROSPAM advises them to publish SPF records to protect their domain from spoofing, and advises the client to remove the email addresses posted on their Web site.

Mid-June 2006. Managers at the Quebec Chamber of Commerce have been dealing with spam for quite a while. They are particularly concerned about the summer season. When employees come back to work after one or two weeks of vacation, their inboxes are full of spam - what a way to get back into the swing of things! The Chamber of Commerce would really like to take a summer spam vacation so that their team can have a more pleasant return to work.

Luc Archambeault, who works for the inter-chamber committee affiliated with Canada Economic Development, has his office at the Chamber of Commerce. He heard about ZEROSPAM at a government procurement show in February. He calls and asks if the Chamber of Commerce could sign a three-month agreement for the summer. ZEROSPAM accepts, the agreement is signed, and the service is activated. However, the Chamber of Commerce's DNS service provider incorrectly changes the MX records intended to activate ZEROSPAM and the email service is cut off! Everyone panics and conference calls are made between the Chamber of Commerce, the DNS service provider and ZEROSPAM. The provider admits that they made a mistake and agrees to correct the problem, but the client would have to wait until the next day (DNS changes are only made once a day because the service is provided by a subcontractor).

No problem! ZEROSPAM implements a temporary email service and ensures that the DNS changes are done correctly the next day. Email users at the Chamber of Commerce suddenly become worried. The quantity of incoming email has decreased so much that people are wondering whether the email is working properly. Everything is indeed working perfectly - the only difference is that spam is no longer getting through.

Once summer vacations are over, the Chamber of Commerce managers are already used to life without spam and they don't miss undesirable emails at all. This is how ZEROSPAM's temporary arrangement translated into a long-term customer.

November 2005. The SOPFEU (society for preventing forest fires) is tired of spam and decides to try the ZEROSPAM solution. The network manager is pleased that users no longer have a spam problem and points out that the number of legitimate emails blocked by the service is practically nil. The system requires very few resources. There's no equipment to buy, no installation, nothing to manage. In short, things couldn't be better.

At the beginning of January, one of ZEROSPAM's technicians notices that SOPFEU's server is no longer receiving email. ZEROSPAM contacts the client, who then realizes that their server is down. While the SOPFEU is trying to solve the problem, ZEROSPAM continues to accept and store their emails. As soon as the SOPFEU's server is operational, ZEROSPAM forwards their stored messages. Not a single email is lost. No senders received non-delivery messages. ZEROSPAM considerably reduced the negative impact of the server malfunction and the customer is simply delighted.