Greeneville City Schools

Background: Greeneville City Schools is a small public school system in northeast, Tennessee. The school district serves 2,800 students in four elementary schools, one middle school, one high school, and one Center for Technology with 221 teachers and approximately 200 educational support staff members.  The district is rated within the top three to five school districts in the state for test scores. The entire school system is supported by a staff of three information systems technicians who manage 500 email accounts.

Challenges: The entire school system is supported by a staff of three information systems technicians who manage 500 email accounts. The lead technician of the staff, Larry Jones, is dedicated to ensuring that students don’t see any inappropriate spam emails that might appear in a teacher’s inbox or search for improper subjects while doing research for school projects. He’s also focused on keeping the school district’s computer network virus-free. Given the distribution of the school buildings, “remote management tools are our bread and butter!” he said.

Even though the district has access to a low-cost service for Internet filtering, network and email security Jones, who has been working for Greeneville City Schools for 7 years after beginning his career as an IT consultant twenty four years ago, along with his team manage the school’s firewall, proxy, email server and email filtering internally. “We’re control freaks! If I have a problem, I want it to be my problem,” he said.

Issues: In 1999, the director of schools computer was infected by the Happy 99 virus.  The virus was inadvertently sent to everyone in the district’s system. It took Jones and his team almost a week to clear the virus out. At the time, the school district was using Norton Anti-Virus, and it didn’t catch the problem. “I’ve never been a real Norton fan; I’ve seen it pass over too many viruses,” Jones said.   It was this event which prompted Greeneville to begin looking for an email filter.

A short time later, there was an outbreak of pornographic emails. “Back in those days it was not uncommon for us to all get five, six, seven pornographic emails a day - with pictures.  We had to stop those pictures from reaching the teachers’ desktops,” Jones said.

Jones and the school administration’s top priority is to make sure students never see these types of emails. “Can you imagine if a second-grader saw those emails? One word to their parents and we would be on the front page of the newspaper,” Jones said. “And that is exactly where we don’t want to be.”

The Greeneville City Schools needed a reliable software solution that would protect email accounts from the overflow of unwanted spam messages and viruses infiltrating their systems.

Solution provided by GFI: GFI MailEssentials has a high spam detection rate using server-based Bayesian filtering technology that automatically adapts to each organization’s email environment.  It also detects and blocks phishing emails through a system called Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and keyword checks. In addition to anti-spam filtering and anti-phishing protection, GFI MailEssentials also adds email management tools to the mail server: disclaimers, mail monitoring, Internet mail reporting, list server, server-based auto replies and POP3 downloading.

Out of the one million emails a month the Greeneville City School District receives, 95 percent are spam messages.  Dogged determination combined with GFI’s MailEssentials software has allowed them to achieve a false/positive rate for spam email of .03 percent. “We have become so efficient, that when our users do get a spam email, they ask why the spam has gotten through, even though it hardly ever happens,” Jones said.

The school system uses GFI’s MailSecurity software to seize all incoming email to  automatically check for viruses, worms, trojans and other malware. GFI offers its customers up to five anti-virus engines bundled with its solution, and Greeneville City Schools use the anti-virus engines from BitDefender and Kaspersky in its solution. 

Summary: Out of the one million emails a month the Greeneville City School District receives, 95 percent are spam messages.  Dogged determination combined with GFI’s MailEssentials software has allowed them to achieve a false/positive rate for spam email of .03 percent. The school system uses GFI’s MailSecurity software to seize all incoming email to  automatically check for viruses, worms, trojans and other malware. GFI offers its customers up to five anti-virus engines bundled with its solution, and Greeneville City Schools use the anti-virus engines from BitDefender and Kaspersky in its solution.
 
In addition to providing software solutions to filter out spam and detect email viruses, the system uses a custom interface developed by Mikhail Levin, which allows Jones and his team to constantly manage the activity on their network. “The Web interface shows me that since midnight last night, I’ve processed 77,000 emails. I have deleted 65,000, because they were spam.  Another technician has had to look at 800 emails since midnight, because there was something wrong with the header,” Jones said.  The Web interface also allows Jones to check if emails successfully left their server in case employees are having difficulties sending outbound emails due to words within the message that may have caused the Bayesian filter to flag them for manual review.

GFI Software
15300 Weston Parkway Suite 104
Cary, NC 27513 USA
Tel: +1-919-379-3397

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