Tyson Foods

Tyson Foods Inc., Eliminates Spam, Boosts Employee Productivity and Improves System Performance with Proofpoint Protection Server™

COMBATING SPAM Tyson Foods, Inc., has provided quality food products to consumers for nearly 70 years and leads the market in the production and marketing of beef, pork and chicken products. The company posted $24.5 billion in annual sales for 2003 and continues to grow through strong sales and strategic acquisitions, all aimed at furthering the company's commitment to providing customers with the highest quality meat products on the market.

Tyson's IT department faced a critical problem in 2003 — the spam onslaught had overwhelmed the company's homegrown content filtering engine. “We created our system to identify word strings, block specific domains and discard email with embedded spam HTML links. Although the rules we wrote were removing a lot of spam, we were still not catching it all and we were also losing valid emails in the process of filtering the spam,” said Dale Gainey, senior systems administrator at Tyson. “It was also incredibly difficult for us to keep up with the spammers, who were constantly coming up with new techniques to fool filters like ours. We realized we were fighting a losing battle, and needed a commercial-grade solution to the problem.”

Tyson's email user base includes more than 14,000 mailboxes, ranging from sales and manufacturing personnel to the CEO. According to Gainey, Tyson's IT department was receiving hundreds of trouble tickets a month from employees regarding emails that were either incorrectly labeled as spam or were spam messages that the content filtering engine did not detect.

“We needed a dedicated anti-spam solution that could be easily configured and stay one step ahead of the spammers,” Gainey said.

FINDING A CENTRALIZED, IN-HOUSE SOLUTION TO THE SPAM PROBLEM
Gainey and his staff evaluated multiple solutions over a six-month period, weighing the pros and cons of outsourced anti-spam services versus deploying an in-house solution. As part of this evaluation, Gainey and his team piloted four different solutions, including the Proofpoint Protection Server. The team then ranked the results of the pilot program according to multiple criteria including effectiveness of quarantine, ease of deployment, availability of safe- and block-lists and false-positive rate. After careful review the Tyson team determined that an in-house deployment of the Proofpoint Protection Server was the ideal solution.

“In addition to the outstanding performance of the Proofpoint solution, one of the biggest reasons that we selected Proofpoint was because of the company's willingness to collaborate with my team on the development of some advanced image detection and analysis features,” said Gainey. “Proofpoint offered us a winning combination of great 'out of the box' functionality combined with ongoing technical innovation.”

Tyson initially piloted the Proofpoint Protection Server on a live domain, which was left over from a recent corporate acquisition. “Using a live domain enabled us to get a 'real world' flavor for how the Proofpoint Protection Server would perform,” Gainey said. “We set up approximately 15 users on this domain and allowed mail to flow through to these accounts. The pilot lasted for approximately one month, with these accounts receiving hundreds of spam emails per day. The Proofpoint Protection Server was perfect – it did not let through a single piece of spam, and there was not a single false positive.”

ONE PLATFORM, MULTIPLE BENEFITS
Tyson officially launched the Proofpoint Protection Server on March 24, 2004, with an initial rollout to 336 users, and a full-scale rollout to the entire user base one week later. According to Gainey, Proofpoint ensured that the process was successfully completed without a hitch. Proofpoint's professional services team configured the Tyson servers and established a clustered environment with two mail agents and one master. All hardware installation for the entire implementation was completed in just one and a half days.

Since putting the Proofpoint Protection Server into full production, Tyson has continued to experience 99.998% effectiveness on spam elimination even as the total volume of attempted inbound email has grown substantially due to the continued increase in spam messages. “The Proofpoint Protection Server's reporting module tells us that 60% of our daily inbound email is spam,” Gainey said. “This amounts to tens of thousands of spam messages that are not making it through to our end-users and, as a result, save users from lost productivity.”

Additionally, the Proofpoint Protection Server's integrated anti-virus capability stops viruses at the email gateway. The impact of this solution was almost immediate, because the Netsky virus emerged simultaneously with the “go live” date of Tyson's deployment. “The Proofpoint Protection Server caught hundreds of viruses. Having Proofpoint's virus protection features at the gateway provides a welcome extra level of protection against virus attacks and vastly reduces the load on anti-virus software running on our internal mail servers,” Gainey said. “In fact, the Proofpoint Protection Server caught more than 64,000 viruses — ranging from MyDoom and Bagle to Netsky and Dumari – in its first 30 days.”

As a result of its Proofpoint Protection Server deployment, Tyson's IT department has recouped hundreds of work hours each year that used to be spent addressing the company's spam and virus problems. Additionally, the elimination of spam has enabled the company to free up enormous amounts of storage capacity and network bandwidth.

“We needed a solution that was easy to manage and could provide us peace of mind, and the Proofpoint Protection Server has delivered on every front,” Gainey said. “My staff no longer has to worry about blocking spam and viruses, enabling us to spend more time focused on strategic activities, and because the Proofpoint Protection Server is a true platform, we know that the solution will be able to address future email- and message-related threats as they arise.”

ABOUT TYSON FOODS
Tyson Foods, Inc., founded in 1935 with headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, is the world's largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef and pork and the second largest food company in the Fortune 500. Tyson Foods produces a wide variety of brand name protein-based and prepared food products marketed in the United States and more than 80 countries around the world. Tyson Foods is the recognized market leader in the retail and foodservice markets it serves. The Company has approximately 120,000 team members and 300 facilities and offices in 26 states and 22 countries.Tyson is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker (NYSE: TSN).