Read about AlaWeb's experience with Traffic Control in this Network World article.
The Organization
AlaWeb began its operations in 1996, serving Internet access to the local Andalusia area. That same year, AlaWeb partnered with Covington Rural Services (CRS), a subsidiary of Covington Electric Services of Andalusia, AL. That partnership has endured and AlaWeb today is the largest Internet provider in South Alabama offering High-Speed Dial-Up, Wireless Broadband, WildBlue Satellite Broadband, and many other services to the area.
The Challenge
As one of the first Internet access providers in Alabama, let alone the Southern United States, AlaWeb's domain name has a long history with spammers. AlaWeb receives nearly 5 million connections a day to its email gateways and 98% of those connections are from spammers. In the Fall of 2006, increasing spam volumes were overwhelming the company's four anti-spam servers, and the incumbent spam filter provider was unable to provide a scalable solution at a price AlaWeb could afford.
Even after culling 80% of inbound spam connections using leading blacklists such as the Spamhaus Block List and the commercial blacklist offered by Sophos PureMessage, AlaWeb still faced lengthy message delivery delays not to mention unacceptable amounts of spam pouring into clients inboxes. A new breed of spammers was hammering AlaWeb's servers with up to 200 concurrent SMTP sessions exhausting available memory and further taxing system resources.
The Solution
"My pager was ringing off the hook at all hours of the night due to excessive system loads caused by spam," said Hugh Messenger, Director of IT for AlaWeb. "So when MailChannels called and offered a solution based on traffic shaping, I was very keen to try it."
Messenger installed Traffic Control on all four mail servers, and since then has not reported a single message delivery delay or system overload. Spam has also been reduced: Even with spam making up 98% of inbound SMTP connections, AlaWeb customers now receive 70-80% less spam than prior to the installation of Traffic Control.
We simply couldn't do it without Traffic Control, said Messenger. Our system now easily handles the worst spam attacks, and we haven't had to invest in any new hardware.
The Future
"Spammers continue to innovate," said Messenger. "And with the service provider business being as competitive as it is, a multi-layered approach using a technology such as Traffic Control is a requirement as I said, I couldn't do it without Traffic Control."
