Specializing in 'Total Solutions Hosting' Apollo Hosting provides everything their customers need to build, sell and market their websites. Their web servers were processing over half a million unsolicited spam emails on a daily basis. Apollo's Vice President of Operations, Don McLeman was I.T. Manager at the time and oversaw the switch to CanIt-PRO. "We were fairly happy with our anti-spam filter at the time, but they wanted to renegotiate the contract," McLeman explains, "this would have been expensive for us and bad for our clients."

The hunt was on for another Spam Filter provider. McLeman jokes that "One of our techs brought up Roaring Penguin's CanIt as a possible solution to our problem at the time, but the way he described it didn't make it sound like the solution we were looking for." Apollo went with another provider and quickly found that it required too much effort. "...these products were good, but required constant checking, and changing of settings to meet customer demands."

The "Goldilocks Solution" ...
Having tried products that were too expensive or too complex, Apollo was shy about trying a third; but they knew they needed an anti-spam solution. The decision to search for a third solution was prompted after Customer complaints and a systems failure.

When the President Says "CanIt" , you CanIt!
The implementation of CanIt at Apollo Hosting began when company President, Tamara Field saw CanIt in action for another company and decided to have another look at CanIt. From there it was smooth sailing.

McLeman explains that they took full advantage of the 30 day trial period. "Once Roaring Penguin's CanIt was running on our own systems we realized it was definitely the right choice.... Before (switching to CanIt), 50% - 70% of my staffs' time was spent getting servers Whitelisted, etc., (and) handling Customer complaints in regards to spam. 1.4 to 1.8 million messages a day are filtered. With a success rate of 97%, (CanIt-PRO is) far superior to our old product."

The move was made to deploy CanIt across the board, providing customers around the world with the most user friendly and cost effective anti-spam filter Apollo Hosting has used. "At first people were miffed about the switch from another product to CanIt-PRO," says McLeman, "but now I rarely, if ever, hear anything negative."

Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold, Just Right!
McLeman chose to run CanIt-PRO on Redhat Linux servers. On the client side CanIt runs as part of Apollo's MailBoxCop spam and virus filter. Clients get MailBoxCop for a small fee and it applies to all email addresses in each domain.

McLeman also appreciates the fact that there is not much tinkering required, "Customers pretty much make all the changes they need to." Of course, Apollo Hosting has some basic anti-spam settings in place across the board, but the browser accessible control panel allows individual users to make their own settings.

Apollo Hosting was able to theme their implementation of CanIt-PRO to match their corporate branding and colors. Branded as Mailbox Cop, a simple web page provides a basic overview of the features available to the user and more complete user documentation is available online as a PDF.

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