System Administrators Spend Significant Time Managing Spam, Favor Flexible Solutions

Ottawa, Canada (PRWEB) November 12, 2003 -

Roaring Penguin Software Inc., a leading provider of e-mail filtering and anti-spam software for enterprises, campuses and ISPs, today released primary data that indicates system administrators in mid-size organizations bear the brunt of the spam problem.

In a survey conducted by Roaring Penguin at the LISA'03 conference and exhibition in San Diego, California in late October, 38% of system administrators from organizations of 250-1000 e-mail users who responded said they spend 25 minutes or more each day managing spam. In organizations of fewer than 250 users, 26% spend more than 25 minutes per day dealing with spam. This is in contrast to organizations with greater than 1000 users, where only about 15% of administrators said they spend that much time taking care of the junk e-mail problem.

Bill White, VP of Marketing and Sales at Roaring Penguin, said, “In larger organizations, we are more likely to see numerous administrators handling e-mail, so in fact, the resource drain is at least as high for our large customers. But it's administrators in small and mid-size organizations that really feel the pain, because there may only be one or two IT staff to deal with the entire organizations' needs. Many of our customers tell us that as much as 80% of their total e-mail volume is junk, with an average of about 50% and growing.”

The survey, which represents more than 90 different organizations, also revealed that system administrators prefer flexible solutions to take care of spam and favor solutions over which they have the greatest control. 24% of respondents said they use in-house mail filtering rules, and 27% said they use open-source solutions.

“These findings are not surprising,” said David Skoll, President of Roaring Penguin. “We know from our customers – whether they are campuses, ISPs, web hosts or enterprises – that flexibility is a key factor in their choice of CanIt products, which make administration and customization of our anti-spam solutions very simple. Access to the code and the ability to easily create and manage their own unique rules in addition to CanIt's sophisticated mix of spam-fighting tactics is important to our customers.”

Based on the acclaimed MIMEDefang e-mail inspection and manipulation software, also developed and maintained by Roaring Penguin, CanIt offers the industry's most complete and flexible anti-spam and anti-virus solution. It can be deployed in any enterprise e-mail environment, including on all Linux and UNIX servers. As a stand-alone gateway appliance, it can protect e-mail environments running non-UNIX servers, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.

CanIt is available in standard and professional versions as either a software download or on a plug-and-play appliance. CanIt-PRO is ideal for very large enterprises, ISPs, and campus environments, where control and management of the system needs to be distributed to individual departments or users. A free trial version of CanIt can be obtained at http://www.canit.ca/evaluation.php.

Complete survey results are available to interested members of the media upon request.

About Roaring Penguin

Founded in 1999, Roaring Penguin Software Inc. specializes in providing intelligent computing infrastructure for enterprises. Since 2000, the company has focused on enterprise e-mail filtering, spam fighting and related product lines. Today, Roaring Penguin develops, deploys and supports a range of acclaimed mail-filtering and networking products. For more information visit http://www.roaringpenguin.com. A trial version of CanIt can be obtained at http://www.canit.ca/evaluation.php
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