City of Vaughan relies on MCI Canada for email spam protection

Managed Scanning Anti-Spam Service Helps Control Unwanted E-mail for the City's 800 users

Toronto, June 26, 2006 - More than 800 employees in the City of Vaughan now have more protection against unwanted, time-wasting e-mail content, following the recent introduction of MCI Canada's Managed Scanning Anti-Spam service. MCI Canada's Managed Scanning Anti-Spam service has decreased City of Vaughan employee's inbox message volume, helping to free up valuable bandwidth and system storage while improving system efficiency. Because it is a managed service, it has also enabled the City to offload maintenance of the function to MCI Canada.

Spam is often a difficult issue to address, as spammers can alter their methods rapidly to avoid detection. With spammers becoming more sophisticated in their disguises, MCI Canada's Managed Scanning Anti-Spam service uses multiple spam filtering techniques, including a combination of heuristics, artificial intelligence and customer configurable black lists/white lists to focus on intercepting unsolicited e-mail at the Internet level, before it can reach the user's network. As part of MCI Canada's Managed Scanning service, the network administrator can then indicate how intercepted spam should subsequently be handled-which can free up human resources, alleviate bandwidth issues and reduce the demands made upon valuable storage space.

"It's proving to be a quick and painless way to eliminate a significant threat to our IT systems," said City of Vaughan CIO, Dimitri Yampolsky. "Beyond the nuisance cost of jammed e-mailboxes and wasted time, we are actively assuring our system reliability both internally and for our citizens. With more and more of our services to taxpayers being offered online, we are simply not prepared to take a chance with system-wide crashes due to viruses."

"Unprotected email is a risk that threatens every government organization and company's business operations, relationships, IT costs and productivity," said Robert Quance, general manager of MCI Canada. "We're pleased to be offering the City of Vaughan, and enterprises across the country, this cost-effective way to detect and stop a lot of unwanted email messages and spam before they can do harm."

The MCI Managed Scanning Service doesn't require any additional hardware or software purchases, equipment installation, upgrades or patching, thus saving organizations considerable expense. Moreover, businesses avoid risk of obsolescence because the intelligence of the service resides within the MCI Canada network.

About MCI Canada
MCI Canada, Inc. is a leading communications provider, delivering innovative, cost-effective, advanced communications connectivity to businesses, governments and consumers. As part of Verizon, MCI Canada has one of the most expansive global IP backbones and wholly-owned data networks that develops the converged communications products and services that are the foundation for commerce and communications in today's market. For more information, go to http://global.mci.com/ca/