big river

Big River Telephone deploys spam firewall

Business Today

Big River Telephone, a Cape Girardeau-based telephone company serving Eastern Missouri, Southern Illinois and Western Kentucky, has completed implementation of a spam firewall system. Results of this installation have resulted in a dramatic reduction in junk email to its customer base, according to company officials.

Single-day statistics indicate the new system is turning away tens of thousands of unwanted emails every day.

Spam, commonly known as junk mail, is the source of growing aggravation for many companies and individual email users. Spammers are continuously looking for ways to pass through firewalls.

Big River Telephone marketing coordinator Meredith White said the spam firewall was put in place because of the company's ability to learn from the end-users what to establish as junk mail. The system is capable of handling several million messages per day, filtering and containing both spam and viruses without slowing down email servers. The firewall has a tracking feature that searches for potential spam and virus patterns.

White said that in a typical day, Big River's spam filter will block thousands of junk emails, allowing legitimate mail through to the user.

"Our customers have the option of setting their own policies with respect to what they receive," said White. "Once a policy has been set, suspect email is tagged and sent to the end-user offering the option of accepting or deleting the messages."

Many Internet service providers provide some type of filter, but usually require a monthly fee for an effective spam blocker. Big River Telephone provides this service free to its Internet customers.

"We implemented the firewall in May and received immediate results. All Internet customers were notified via email and the installation was transparent to the customer," said Nathan Littlepage, network operations manager at Big River. "Rarely will the filter hold up valid email, but if that should happen the customer can notify Big River to make further adjustments ensuring delivery to their inbox.

"If the email falls within a certain rating, the filter will tag the message as potential spam. If that mail is spam, we can adjust the rating of that message and the database will be updated immediately."

Kevin Keaveny, vice president of engineering, said the sending of spam is increasingly and negatively affecting the quality of service experienced by email subscribers.

"We see the addition of this service as another way of delivering added value and performance from our network," said Keaveny.