After experiencing its fair share of virus attacks as well as dealing with the ongoing problem of spam overwhelming the corporate network, luxury car retailer Brisbane BMW, made the decision to upgrade its e-mail management system.

Since the upgrade the third largest BMW dealer in Australia has been able to eliminate 20,000 spam e-mails a month.

BMW Brisbane managing director, Martin Roller, said the company assessed a range of options before selecting a NetBox appliance that is currently being used by more than 300 car retailers.

The appliance has an integrated suite of features including spam, malware and virus filtering, a firewall and range of reporting tools.

Roller said it runs on an IBM System X server ensuring true data centre quality hardware with built-in resilience.

"Other solutions the company considered required faulty appliances to be returned to the manufacturer for repair; this could have exposed us to serious downtime while repairs were being undertaken,"he said.

The NetBox Blue remote management service monitors the underlying hardware platform but also performs regular backups of the customer's configuration settings.

Computer Merchants recommended the solution to BMW because the appliance has a pre-delivery filtering engine that performs multiple checks on the body of each e-mail before it is downloaded from the Internet.

The managing director of Computer Merchants, Norm Jefferies, said of the 91.25 per cent of e-mail blocked, 89 per cent is blocked at the Internet SMTP level.

"This gives BMW crucial savings in bandwidth and download costs along with dramatic efficiency savings due to the massive reduction in spam," he said.

Viruses have been virtually eliminated although in a typical month NetBox blocks over 250 external virus threats including several phishing attempts.

This is in addition to blocking about 10 internal threats from spreading.