PA School Districts Get Abaca

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Abaca Technology Corporation, an innovator in email protection and messaging security, today announced that BLaST Intermediate Unit (IU) 17, Pennsylvania’s largest Intermediate Unit, plans to install the Abaca Email Protection Gateway™ appliance and Abaca ReceiverNet™ Service in 12 school districts within its organization.

Public Email Addresses Hammered by SpamBLaST IU 17 is an education service agency whose mission is to deliver effective, efficient and economical services to the 19 school districts and 36,000 students in its Intermediate Unit, which includes Bradford, Lycoming, Sullivan and Tioga counties in Pennsylvania.

Since BLaST IU 17 is a large education service agency with a public mission, the email addresses of many of its departments and employees are public as well. So in the course of reaching out to students, parents, teachers, and administrators, BLaST IU 17 became an easy target for spammers.

Over a five-year period, BLaST IU 17 tried several popular email filters. As time progressed, they had only marginal success in blocking spam. Some filters didn’t work well at all; others worked initially but then gradually lost their effectiveness. Meanwhile, the spam kept coming. Some email users were receiving hundreds of spam messages every day, one mailbox often received upwards of 500 spam messages a day!

“Educational institutions are popular targets for spam because they typically have sizeable networks and plenty of publicly available email addresses,” observed Leo Jolicoeur, chief executive officer of Abaca Technology Corporation. “But educational institutions also have limited budgets and lots of demand for network bandwidth. They’re not well equipped to deal with a flood of spam pouring in every day.”Abaca Technology Corp.