MEDIA RELEASE
Slingshot curbs surging spam volumes for customers with IronPort Anti-Spam

Auckland, Monday 18 June, 2007 –Slingshot, part of CallPlus Group, New Zealand’s largest 100% kiwi owned full service telecommunications company, has completed the rollout of a new managed antispam solution, two IronPort C650 Email Security Appliances, for all its internet users to ensure faster and more efficient email delivery without delays.

Customers will be experiencing immediate improvements when downloading emails. In the first few days of IronPort Anti-Spam being implemented 14 million emails were processed, of which only 2 million emails were found to be legitimate. The illegitimate emails were stopped from reaching Slingshot’s mail servers.

"The antispam measure has been a considerable investment for Slingshot, but critical as part of our new branding as ’A Better Place’,” says Mark Callander, General Manger for Slingshot. “We sought a powerful solution to significantly increase the email experience for all our customers and also ensure we could easily cope with future spam deluges. Customers rely on email and a near real time communication tool and as an internet provider we need to ensure this expectation is met.”

Slingshot's spam protection was previously provided directly through its mail servers like most New Zealand based internet providers. Now with the IronPort solution 80% to 85% of email is blocked before even reaching Slingshot’s mail servers. IronPort Anti-Spam also provides greater accuracy when detecting spam with a 1 in 1 million false positive rate.

Callander continues, “The lower storage requirements and reduced processing on our mail servers has translated into quicker email delivery to customers and a significant drop in the number of spam emails being delivered to them. Customers also no longer have to download the undetected spam mail to their computers which has improved their email experience and broadband users no longer need to pay for downloading unnecessary emails.

“IronPort has one of the most superior antispam appliances on the market, which made it the obvious choice for Slingshot who is positioning itself as one of the leading internet providers in New Zealand. Specialising in email and web filtering, IronPort processes over 25% of the world’s email and is being used by 12 of the 15 largest ISPs in the world and 7 of the 10 largest banks.”

IronPort provides a powerful outer layer of spam defense through Reputation Filtering, a technique it pioneered, and which over 120,000 organisations contribute to. IronPort Anti-spam also addresses a full range of known threats including image spam, phishing and zombie attacks, as well as hard-to-detect low volume, short-lived email threats.

All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective firms.

ENDS

Scoop Business: Will Good Politics Fix Broken Tax System?

Prime Minister John Key is obsessed with two things about the New Zealand economy. One is the fact that productive industry has been shrinking as proportion of the economy for more than five years.

The other is the price of houses – an issue that Reserve Bank governors and other politicians have identified for years and done nothing about. More>>