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Cattlemens Restaurants ropes in spam via detection appliance
When executives at Cattlemens Restaurants Inc. began spending almost an hour each day deleting spam messages, the company no longer considered spam a mere nuisance. By adding an appliance that filters out these often menacing messages, Cattlemens is eliminating spam by at least 95%.
Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Cattlemens is a dinner-only restaurant chain that operates nine locutions in Northern California and one in Arizona. Its newest restaurant will open in Arizona in 2007.
Each location, which is approximately 13,000 sq. ft., exceeds $3 million in sales annually, according to Peter Mrozik, the chain's director of projects and information technology.
Approximately 10% of the company's 600 employees-mostly managers and members of the company's executive team-have an e-mail account. A Lotus Domino e-mail server, located in the corporate office's data center, enables all users to "communicate" via their desktop or laptop computer.
"Besides day-to-day communications, this configuration enables us to centralize training materials, conduct audits and share documents," Mrozik said. "Realtime access to information enables us to reduce paper and clutter and make daily transactions interactive."
For most companies relying on electronic communications, spam is inevitable, and Cattlemens knows this all too well.
"Our associates could spend an average of 30 minutes deleting messages," he explained. "Worse, volume was so abundant that associates began deleting all kinds of messages-whether they were meaningful or not."
While some spam solicited stock tips, other e-mails peddled drugs, such as Viagra. However, tension really mounted when some messages became dangerous.
"In a few instances, spam caused internal viruses," Mrozik recalled. "Some carried attachments like Trojan Horse viruses that were replicated through our system."
One virus attacked Cattlemens' domain-name server, and shut it down, he said. "We couldn't access correspondence outside of the company."
Cattlemens was forced to reinstall and reformat the server to bring it back to its pristine state. However, this included "shutting down the system for half...