Case Study: Kaz Incorporated

September 21, 2005

To provide their workforce with Junk E-mail filtering, Kaz Incorporated, combined their current anti-spam firewall devices with WinDeveloper IMF Tune SCL Management. IMF Tune provides seamless Exchange integration to anti-spam solutions lacking this capability. The setup enabled delivery of spam to the Outlook Junk E-mail folder, minimizing the disruption caused by unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE).

Kaz, a trusted and dedicated healthcare and home environment manufacturer, has been offering high-quality, high-value products since 1926. Kaz is the world's largest vaporizer/humidifier manufacturer and continues to be the most trusted name in the industry.

The Challenge

The MS Exchange organization at Kaz, services over 600 mailboxes with a network spanning various sites across North America, Europe and Asia. In such an organization effective e-mail management is a must. For this purpose Kaz adopts layered e-mail security and anti-spam protection.

Before deploying IMF Tune, e-mails reaching their two bridgehead servers were first analyzed by an anti-spam firewall device and then by the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF). Since the firewall lacked Exchange integration, some e-mails identified as spam were still being delivered to the Inbox. With the ever growing load of UCE, a better solution was required. Spam reaching the Inbox had to be eliminated safeguarding their workforce from its disruptive effect.

Solution

IMF Tune, through its powerful SCL Management functionality, matched the requirements perfectly. By providing the necessary Exchange integration, all identified spam is deposited to the Junk E-mail folder at the recipient mailboxes.

The anti-spam firewall tags UCE through the insertion of e-mail headers. IMF Tune was configured to map these headers to the native Exchange spam rating system (SCLs). In this manner, spam identified at the firewall is assigned an SCL ensuring its routing to the recipient Junk E-mail folder.

Andy Kress, the Director of IT at Kaz, explained the benefits gained from the new setup: "Before IMF Tune, some of the email that was tagged at the firewall did not get tagged by IMF. As such, end users needed to have inbox rules to move things around. With IMF Tune, we are able to apply an IMF SCL to the firewall tagged e-mails and have these items filtered to the Junk E-mail folder automatically."

This type of setup is a perfect example of how anti-spam devices and filters running on any platform can be Exchange integrated. In this manner best of breed technologies may be adopted, greatly hardening anti-spam protection.

At their mailbox, through Junk E-mail folder filtering, users can focus on a spam free Inbox. Additionally through Outlook or Outlook Web Access users may further customize filtering through Safe Senders, Safe Recipients and Blocked Senders lists. It really does not matter whether the e-mail was identified as spam by a filter running on Linux, or on some other dedicated device. IMF Tune takes care to bring everything together providing true seamless integration.

Additional Benefits

IMF Tune is a feature-rich product. Whitelisting, blacklisting, keyword-to-SCL mappings, insertion of SCLs in e-mail subjects, spam rerouting, auto-replies, attachment stripping, detailed logging and archiving are some of its key features. As Andy explains, Kaz is looking forward at taking further advantage of all the available functionality: "I'm hoping to take advantage of IMF Tune a little more and either delete or archive some messages. I also really liked the ability to whitelist/blacklist e-mails at the server level."

IMF Tune is priced per server starting from $298 for a single server. Multiple server licenses can further benefit from discounts. More information is available from the WinDeveloper web site at http://www.windeveloper.com/imftune/. From here a 30 day free evaluation version is available for download.

About WinDeveloper

WinDeveloper Software delivers applications and consultancy services for the Windows platform. WinDeveloper specializes in Microsoft Exchange integrated applications as well as other core Windows technologies. For details on our current consultancy projects and other products, visit our website, www.windeveloper.com

About Kaz Incorporated

For over 75 years Kaz has been a leading manufacturer of innovative, high quality healthcare, home comfort and insect control appliances.

Our tradition of supplying safe, reliable products began when our founder, Max Katzman, invented the electric vaporizer.

Today Kaz is a leading global provider of home environment and personal healthcare products with a portfolio of premier brands including Vicks®, Enviracaire®, Honeywell® and Duracraft®. Kaz offers a wide portfolio of innovative products, consumer trusted brands plus advanced market research and forecasting techniques to better serve our customers.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.