Company: AFM Ltd.
Location: Laughton, England
Industry: Storage and Distribution
Number of Users: 23
Product in Use: GFI MailEssentials™
AFM Ltd. operates a small business providing business-to-business mailing, storage, fulfillment and distribution solutions for companies. The company was receiving hundreds of spam emails on a daily basis and this disrupted the work flow for employees apart from having an impact on the email servers. AFM Ltd. needed to solution to halt the volume of spam and choose GFI MailEssentials to do the job.
AFM Ltd. is a UK-based company that provides mailing, storage, fulfillment and distribution solutions for businesses dealing with Europe, Africa and Asia. Since email is an important channel of communication between the company and their clients, the constant and daily influx of spam became a huge problem as it affected production levels because employees had to spend time going through spam messages and genuine mail. This was a time-wasting exercise and the risk of genuine, important business email being deleted along with spam increased considerably. Apart from being a nuisance to users, the company also noticed that spam volumes were having an impact on its mail servers.
“We were receiving upward of 400 spam emails per day. This was clogging up our inboxes and wasting staff time,” said Alastair Michel, Director of AFM Ltd.
AFM Ltd. decided to install anti-spam software in order to reduce the amount of spam that they were receiving and after testing a few of the software solutions available on the market they decided to install GFI MailEssentials.
“We looked at a number of software solutions, such as Norton and McAfee, and downloaded several to test out. GFI was by far the easiest to set up and use. At the time we were looking for a product which was simple to install and configure and one which worked well. The GFI product was just better than the other two,” said Mr. Michel.
AFM Ltd. needed software that was compatible with their existing setup, an issue that did not surface with GFI MailEssentials.
“We run servers with Windows 2000 Advanced and Microsoft Exchange 2000. The software installed and launched without any issues and it has not created any conflicts within the system. When we reboot the system, the GFI package restarts with all the other server services,” said Mr. Michel.
The ease of installation and its seamless integration with the company’s server structure meant that GFI MailEssentials began stopping spam at server level and preventing it from reaching users’ inboxes within minutes of installation and after some configuration changes. With nearly all spam messages filtered out, the company’s employees were able to focus on their tasks without the hassle of going through each email they received to check if it is spam or a genuine email message.
“Once set up, the impact of the software was immediate. The level of spam getting through the system has fallen from 400 to a handful” confirmed Mr. Michel.
GFI MailEssentials has lowered the risk that genuine emails could be deleted by users when sifting through their inbox. The risk of one email being deleted and resulting in a lost business opportunity or a irate customer who never received a reply was too high for AFM Ltd. GFI MailEssentials changed that.
The implementation of GFI MailEssentials helped AFM Ltd. in various aspects from a management, financial and technological point of view resulting in cost-effective and time-saving benefits.
“By cutting down on the spam coming into our email system, we are able to focus on emails which are work-related rather than spending half the day deleting junk. Technology-wise, the software has reduced the load on our email server which in turn has extended its operational life and reduced the level of ongoing maintenance. The software has saved us time on a daily basis not having to deal with spam. Moreover it has eliminated the danger of important emails being deleted with the junk!” said Mr. Michel.
“For a relatively small cost we have saved a massive amount of stress and aggravation caused by the volume of spam email that we were receiving daily.”
For more information about GFI MailEssentials visit: http://www.gfi.com/mes. For your free download trial visit http://www.gfi.com/downloads/register.aspx?pid=me.
November 2009