ProVista Implements Flexible and Secure Email Solutions with Synology MailPlus

ProVista Group struggled with the sheer volume of business emails, with some accounts requiring up to 500GB of storage. The company's seven-year retention policy led to rapid data growth, making the retrieval of accidentally deleted emails from vast archives a significant challenge. With increasing concerns over spam and ransomware, ProVista wanted greater control over their email management. However, their existing cloud-based service couldn't be customized to meet their needs, and setting up an in-house mail server would have demanded significant IT resources. This left ProVista searching for a solution that could balance capacity, ease of use, and security.

ProVista implemented around 300 email accounts via Synology MailPlus to serve their employees. Of these 300, 230 accounts are based in Mainland China, with the remaining 70 used by the Hong Kong office. Emails sent or received in Mainland China first connect to a local MailPlus secondary server, which is then linked to the primary server in Hong Kong. All of the data is centrally managed on a Synology NAS, allowing IT to handle email services through a single interface.

ProVista leveraged Synology MailPlus's built-in security features to prevent phishing and virus emails. The platform offers tools like allowlists/blocklists, spam filtering, account protection, and malicious IP blocking. With flexible security settings, IT teams can create custom security policies, giving them more control than rigid, predefined options. "Synology MailPlus offers excellent operational flexibility. For instance, the lockout for failed login attempts can be automatically adjusted over time or manually configured, making it easy to tailor to our internal needs," Sun noted.

Emails are the primary mode of communication for ProVista, and ensuring the availability of email services is crucial for their continuous operation. Two Synology NAS devices were set up in a high availability (HA) cluster. Additionally, Synology's built-in backup software was used to regularly back up the email servers to two other NAS devices. After each backup, IT receives an email notification detailing whether the process was successful or not. Sun explained, "One of IT's biggest worries is not being aware when a server goes down. The real-time email notifications let us stay on top of backup status, which is incredibly helpful."

By implementing Synology MailPlus, ProVista established a secure and adaptable email system with high availability clustering and regular backups to ensure data can be quickly recovered and services remain uninterrupted. Currently, ProVista operates 11 Synology rack-mounted servers—two dedicated to email and two for file storage. These key email and file servers are regularly backed up to secondary servers, allowing for quick data recovery in case of accidental deletion. The backup server can take over immediately in case of an issue, ensuring service continuity and safeguarding against data loss.