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April 24, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 13
Page(s) 22 in print issue
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Email Transformation
Trucking Company Uses Mailprotector To Stay On Top Of Business
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 Monaca, Penn.,-based PGT Trucking will transport “basically anything that will fit on a flatbed,” says PGT Trucking Network Administrator Ed Patterson. With more than 750 drivers, PGT Trucking moves steel coils, other forms of steel, building materials such as drywall and lumber, and overweight and oversized loads across the United States.
Clients of PGT Trucking (pgttrucking.com) include U.S. Steel, Alcoa, and National Gypsum. It also has an agreement with a major Mexican trucking carrier where PGT drivers bring loads to the Mexican border for the latter carrier to transport into Mexico.
Although its drivers rely primarily on cell phones to communicate, PGT itself depends on email to communicate internally and to facilitate business transactions with customers and suppliers. Some customers are set up with an auto-generating email that tells PGT when a load is available to be transported. “It shoots an email to someone in our operations department saying, ‘Hey, I got a load. Can you move it for us?,’ and then the dispatcher responds and gets a driver and truck assigned to move the load,” Patterson explains. “That’s how we make money, so it’s important that we get that email.”
But Patterson says PGT needed a way to reduce the management responsibilities of its email system. The company did not want to spend time repeatedly trying to make sure its system was up-to-date and properly protected against viruses and spam. “Also, we were sick of paying for renewals for software just so we can keep using it and keep getting updates for it,” Patterson says.
After checking out several hosted email service and security solutions, PGT decided on Mailprotector Email Security (www.mailprotector.net) to manage its email needs.
 The Best Value
Patterson says that most of the email managed service providers PGT researched were comparable to Mailprotector. Most offered a Web interface, whitelists, and blacklists. Overall, though, Mailprotector was one of the least expensive, if not the least expensive, service for PGT’s email needs. And unlike many of the competing services, Mailprotector does not lock its customers into service contracts, so if PGT was dissatisfied with Mailprotector’s service after a month or two, it could cancel the service without incurring any penalties.
Patterson says Mailprotector also provided more functionality for the price. For example, Mailprotector’s Availability Protector feature holds all incoming email, even if a user’s server goes down or loses Internet access. This feature can automatically change from Scan And Forward to Scan And Store until the email server or Internet access returns.
“Instead of the email bouncing back, saying, ‘Hey, they’re down, you can’t send email to them,’ [Mailprotector] just accepts the message and hangs onto it until our system comes back up,” says Patterson. “Other places wanted to charge you extra for that, but it was standard with Mailprotector.”
Straightforward Implementation
PGT Trucking did minimal testing before implementing Mailprotector. “The only testing we could do was [have Mailprotector] generate test messages that got sent to us. We couldn’t see it in action with real emails or data because it is an all-or-nothing thing the way email is sent to you,” Patterson says.
Actual deployment was pretty easy and went in stages, he says. First PGT enabled email from Mailprotector by opening its firewall and telling its email servers that it could accept SMTP email from Mailprotector’s address. Then PGT switched its MX (mail exchanger) record over so that email could start flowing. From there, PGT instructed its firewall only to accept email from its list of valid addresses, including those routing through Mailprotector.
“And then we cut it down to blocking all mail traffic except from Mailprotector. That way, people cannot intentionally bypass an external spam filter” because messages are coming only from Mailprotector, Patterson says.
Overall, Patterson says he is satisfied with Mailprotector’s performance. “It really works. We get almost no spam at all,” Patterson says. “Our mail server doesn’t have to process all that stuff either, so we don’t have to spend as much on hardware because their hardware is taking care of it for us.”
Patterson also likes that PGT no longer has to expend the administrative effort to ensure his email servers are secure. Mailprotector handles the job on its end. All of PGT’s emails are routed through Mailprotector’s network blocks, which scan for vulnerabilities and check email messages for viruses or anything else that might wreak havoc on PGT’s email server. Any emails that survive these tests then pass through Mailprotector’s spam filter heuristics engines before being allowed inside PGT’s own email server.
Offering More Than Expected
Patterson says his organization has received more functionality than he was expecting. Patterson recalls a few instances when PGT needed to change its MX record because it was switching to a new Internet provider.
“Normally when you change your MX record, it could take days to update on the Internet. Now [Mailprotector] is your MX record, so if your Internet address changes, you just have to go to [Mailprotector] and say, ‘Hey, this is my new email server. Start sending my mail there.’ You’ll get it in 10 minutes as opposed to days,” Patterson says.
Patterson admits that when investigating Mailprotector, he was primarily concerned that the company provided available 24/7 technical support. “We didn’t do any research about how good it was, but that really didn’t affect the decision much,” Patterson says.
As for changes he’d like to see in the service, Patterson says he would benefit from having more spam customization capabilities in future iterations of Mailprotector. “Mailprotector has certain system-wide rules and things running in the background to check for spam that we don’t have access to,” he says, noting that there are some instances where PGT has had to set a whitelist for a number of customers because the email would keep getting tagged to spam because of the nature of the way it was written. “If we were able to go in and alter that rule to suit us a little better, we wouldn’t have to worry about whitelisting.”
Overall, however, Patterson says that he is satisfied with Mailprotector and finds it well-suited to PGT’s needs. “There’s nothing else I would change or make different,” he says. 
by Robyn Weisman
Mailprotector Email Security
A hosted email security system that scans incoming email for viruses, spam, and other vulnerabilities before it can reach the user’s email server and provides protection from attacks and backup protection. Works with most email hardware and software platforms, including Exchange, qMail, Sendmail, and Groupwise.
“Instead of the email bouncing back, saying, ‘Hey, they’re down, you can’t send email to them, [Mailprotector] just accepts the message and hangs onto it until our system comes back up. Other places wanted to charge you extra for that, but it was standard with Mailprotector,” says Ed Patterson, network administrator at PGT Trucking.
(800) 393-4840
www.mailprotector.net |
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