Today, the Mendocino Community Network is announcing that we have signed an agreement with Proofpoint, Inc to provide spam and virus filtering services for MCN. Proofpoint will be powering our new MCN Spam and Virus Control (powered by Proofpoint) beginning in mid February. This will replace Postini as our spam and virus filtering solution. Please click read more below for the full announcement!

At MCN, we take spam and virus control very seriously, spending tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of employee hours to keep spam and viruses away from our customers. We’ve been working with Proofpoint for several weeks to develop this new product and are excited about bringing an even higher level of protection to our customers with this product.  

Proofpoint has a great reputation and a long roster of blue chip and local customers, many of them similar to MCN’s own customer base.  Proofpoint is a global organization with customers around the world, but some of Proofpoint’s customers closer to home include: Kaiser Permanente, UCLA Medical Center, UC Bakersfield, Lifelink Foundation, Wells Fargo Bank, Woodside Priory, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, and the Placer County Office of Education.

This is not a decision we’ve taken lightly. We’ve spent over a year exploring how we can make our spam and virus service more effective. After careful evaluation of multiple solutions, we chose Proofpoint because of its leadership in the spam and virus protection industry, and specifically, for the following reasons:

*Accuracy: Proofpoint delivers the highest quality anti-spam protection in the market. For example, their service level agreement (SLAs) for spam protection guarantees 99% accuracy, and their average, measured accuracy in 2007 was 99.6%. Most competitors offer 95% to 98% effectiveness guarantees. Remember: the more accurate the solution, the fewer spams in your inbox!

*Visibility and Control: As a service provider to both our residential and business customers, we need to ensure that we have 24x7 visibility and control into all of our IT systems – whether they are on-premises or off-premises. This allows us to do things like identify issues proactively, create policies that group users and organizations easily, and deliver an overall better customer experience. Visibility and control are especially important with off-premises, anti-spam, hosted solutions where the actual filtering takes place at the vendor’s datacenters. Yet, this is where many solutions falter, including our legacy vendor, Postini. Proofpoint, on the other hand, has the distinct advantage of being able to offer the hosted solution coupled with the visibility and control we desire.

*Clean Interface: Proofpoint has built an easy-to-use interface for both administrators (us) and end users (you). We feel that customers will find the new solution much easier to use and to navigate.

*Independent: Proofpoint is an independent organization, entirely focused on email security and data loss prevention.

 The Proofpoint solution will go live in mid February. Stay tuned for additional information and technical details about the upcoming rollout of  MCN Spam and Virus Control, Powered by Proofpoint!