For a higher education provider, upholding individual rights and freedoms of speech, information and privacy can be a tangled ? and sometimes contradictory ? web. For Ithaca College of Ithaca, New York, the search for an anti-spam solution was guided first by the principle of finding one that end-users could control. ?We wanted end-users to have as much control as possible over their spam,? confirms Lesli LaRocco, systems administrator at the college. ?That's really important here, where there isn't a top-down decision-making policy about what is acceptable content.? But, academic freedom aside, a barrage of pornographic spam caused such a furor among email users that a solution to block such offenses became necessary.

When the mayor calls to complain about the number of junk email messages and the offensive content of many of those messages that he?s getting, a network administrator listens. For Andre Thibodeau, Network Administrator for the City of Yellowknife, dealing with the plague of spam email was a 10-hour a week problem for him alone. "But think about the users," Thibodeau says. "Everytime they hear that a newemail message has come in, they stop what they?re doing and look at the message. Better than 50% of our incoming email was spam. Some of our users were getting 100 spam messages a day that really adds up in terms of unproductive time. We had constant complaints, even from counsilors and the mayor."

When Karel Jennings, a Systems Technician at Grande Prairie Regional College. added it up, he realized that each of the college?s faculty and staff was spending about 30 minutes dealing with as many as 100 spam email messages per day in the worst instances. However, although he received 10 to 15 complaints about the spam problem each week, not everyone agreed that a Draconian solution was in order.

9 March 2004 ? Ottawa, Ontario, Canada ? Dixie-Net, a Mississippi-based Internet Service Provider (ISP) and competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC), has chosen Roaring Penguin Software's flexible CanIt-PRO anti-spam solution to provide its end users with new, custom e-mail filtering options. Dixie- Net's 10,000 Internet users, as well as its domain managers, can now benefit from basic or advanced spam and virus filtering. Chris Marsalis, Dixie-Net's vice president of operations, said, "Our users have been clamoring for a solution to the spam problem for months. We evaluated all the options, including open-source products, paid services and other software solutions. CanIt-PRO was the best solution we have found that allows us to offer our customers the features and services that they need. CanIt-PRO is also flexible enough that we can offer a range of filtering options and packages."

While email users at the Science Museum of Minnesota dealt with the problem of spam email on a daily basis, it was the increasingly offensive nature of the content of those emails that ultimately prompted them to demand an anti-spam solution. "We only heard about spam when people had big problems with it," says Joel Miles, the museum?s network software support specialist. "People sort of lived with it, cleaning spam out of their mail boxes for 10 or 15 minutes each day. But when they started to get a lot of offensive emails, that triggered complaints so we began to look for a solution."

As a 360,000-member worldwide professional association, the IEEE focuses on delivering services. An e-mail alias service is one of those offerings. ?IEEE members are part of one of the most prestigious technical professional associations in the world,? says Robert V. Jones, the association?s senior director of electronic communications, ?and an IEEE e-mail address is one of the benefits of membership.? E-mail is also important to the IEEE?s business. ?A large portion of our business is conducted via e-mail because we are a widely dispersed and volunteerdriven organization,? Jones explains. ?In fact, our e-mail volumes have been doubling year-on-year.?

As both a business and technical college, Algonquin College serves a diverse user community. So, when it set out to find a solution to its e-mail problems, the college's ITS department knew it would have to accommodate a range of needs ? within a fiscally responsible budget. Barry Brock, director of ITS, remembers, ?spam was hampering us from both a time and productivity perspective.? But, a rash of e-mail borne viruses provided the impetus for seeking a better solution.

Specializing in 'Total Solutions Hosting' Apollo Hosting provides everything their customers need to build, sell and market their websites. Their web servers were processing over half a million unsolicited spam emails on a daily basis. Apollo's Vice President of Operations, Don McLeman was I.T. Manager at the time and oversaw the switch to CanIt-PRO. "We were fairly happy with our anti-spam filter at the time, but they wanted to renegotiate the contract," McLeman explains, "this would have been expensive for us and bad for our clients."