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5 Things the Boss Should Know About Spam Fighting
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Feb 17, 2007 04:36 PM
from the never-give-up-never-surrender dept.
from the never-give-up-never-surrender dept.
Esther Schindler writes "Sysadmins and email administrators were asked to identify the one thing they wish the CIO understood about their efforts to fight spam. The CIO website is now running their five most important tips, in an effort to educate the corporate brass. Recommendations are mostly along the lines of informing corporate management; letting bosses know that there is no 'silver bullet', and that the battle will never really end. There's also a suggestion to educate on technical matters, bringing executives into the loop on terms like SMTP and POP. Their first recommendation, though, is to make sure no mail is lost. 'This is a risk management practice, and you need to decide where you want to put your risk. Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream.'"
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Nothing lost? (Score:4, Informative)
Their first recommendation, though, is to make sure no mail is lost.
Nice goal, but you are going to lose mail. It is either going to get buried in the pile of spam or misclassified as spam by your software and pitched. What you need to do is pick an acceptable level -- it is all about trade-offs.
I like to REJECT (not bounce!) spam, so when you accidentally mark good stuff as spam, the sender has a chance to get the message to you later.
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I like to REJECT (not bounce!) spam, so when you accidentally mark good stuff as spam, the sender has a chance to get the message to you later.
Yeah, thanks. Then when someone fakes my email address as the return address, I get thousands of bounce messages.
Re:Nothing lost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, thanks. Then when someone fakes my email address as the return address, I get thousands of bounce messages.
Did you miss the part about:
I like to REJECT (not bounce!) spam
If I reject the mail, then you'll only get a message back if your SMTP server was the one that was sending it. If I bounce the mail, then you'll a message even if it was forged elsewhere.
People who bounce spam are almost as bad as the spammers. Rejecting spam is much better than just deleting it because it gives the sender a chance to fix your mistake.
Parent
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Re:Nothing lost? (Score:4, Informative)
Just to be clear:
- Eve is a spammer sending mail
- Clueless ISP (clueless.xxx) is being used to send the spam
- Alice's address (alice@alicedomain.xxx) is being forged by Eve
- Bob at bobdomain.xxx is the intended receiver for the spam
Typically Eve sends an amazing offer "from" alice@alicedomain.xxx through clueless.com to bob@bobdomain.xxx. If Bob bounces the spam, it would go from bobdomain.xxx directly to alicedomain.xxx. I suspect this is what you are seeing, and happens because Bob is doing his spam filtering after he has accepted the message from clueless.xxx.If Bob rejects the spam while in the process of receiving it from clueless.xxx, clueless.xxx would get a bad status code. Chances are the mail program is just a bot which would ignore the error (or retry the same message a couple of times). If Eve is using an MTA on clueless like exim or sendmail, and it is badly configured, then Alice might see a bounce message generated by clueless.xxx. Alice can complain to the administrators at clueless, or get clueless added to RBLs. The good news for Alice in this situation is that she isn't dealing with thousands of bots. In any case, Bob didn't send a bounce message, he just didn't accept the incoming mail.
Rejecting spam at the SMTP level is the best practice, and is different than bouncing spam.
Parent
Re:Nothing lost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I know several people has said it on this thread and on almost all mail/spam threads, but it can't be stressed enough: Reject the message on the SMTP phase! DO NOT accept the message and then bounce it. I guess viruses you can discard if you want, but DO NOT bounce them!
Exchange admins, please configure your se
WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really believe that a CIO understands all of the underlying technology in the IT department, even at a basic level? Trust me, most don't. It's near impossible, especially when most CIO's haven't been individual contributors for many years.
Parent
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Spamers have stolen the usefulness of email away and if its not fixed real soon, it will be completely worthless to more and more people. I'm hearing from more and more people "oh, I don't check email much anymore, its all junk"
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
A good manager should appear to have very little to do, because everything is so well organised.
A bad manager is very easy to spot. People under them feel unsupported, become over relient on rules and regulations, and everything takes so long to do that nothing gets done.
I've experienced both types of management, the bad type is painful. When I've managed (in medicine) I worked very hard to train my people to trust in their own abilities and take on and enjoy responsibility.
Nothing to do with spam in this post I realise, but then I hate spam, nasty fatty stuff.
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because managers are there to manage, not to be technicians. The most effective managers should know something about what they manage, but they do not need to know the details. They are supposed to be "big-picture" people and leave the details to the experts they hire. When a manager knows too much about what they manage they tend to micro-manage and I am sure we all dislike that more than ignorant managers.
Personally I would rather have a manager that gives me the responsibility and flexibility to make the decisions that are within the scope of my job function who knows nothing about what I do and how I do it than one that is more knowledgable but ties my hands when it comes to getting things done. The CIO should dictate the overarching business strategy to the IS department and help ensure that their work helps accomplish the goals of that strategy. The details are for the rest of the department to figure out. Remember, the IS department is a supporting function, no different from accounting, marketing, or HR... it is not the business.
I'm sure I will be flamed for this response, but it is typical of technical people (not just IT, but in all functions) to have disdain for those in charge because they don't know what we know. But it isn't their job to, or else they would have no reason to hire us. A CIO position is NOT a technical position. Expecting a CIO to know everthing going on in the IS department is the same as expecting the CEO to know it as well.
Parent
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I have worked for 3 fortune xxx companies. None of the CIO/CTO have know _anything_ about IT. Nothing. All have been business people that were transfered from some other department. A lot of the bigger companies like to play "musical manager" where the "upper" level management gets moved around so they know more roles of the company. This gets them promoted faster... go figure.
I just recently went through a corporate re-org. The new CIO is actually a "financial" chick (though her know
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, I took over the job when the fileserver crashed, and the CIO at the time didn't understand the difference between a workstation and a server, and couldn't figure out what "no backup" meant. Bless her soul, she's a great leader over a good many things. But she was assigned to the job because the commanding officer at the time was not IT-savvy, and said "it's just
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What they actually do has little to do with it, this is especially the case in larger govt organisations where the CIO's are people with almost no understanding of computers.
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Oh man... I just spit something out of my nose! Did anyone correct your CIO? To me this sounds like the last time this dude had _any_ knowledge of IT, it was with COBOL/CICS type stuff.
:-)
May you be blessed my son
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many high level concepts such as requirements, design, group management, etc can be managed by people and they don't have to have intimate knowledge of the latest technology. I am not saying that management should not learn it, but they should expect their employees to be the experts.
Why is it that there are a lot of people in IT who are so snobbish "omg!!!@!!!.... you don't know about xyz technology, you made a mistake hahahhadjhaflkdjfs luser." Are other technical/engineering fields like this? (not a knock on the parent post, just askin' in general).
Parent
Something for nothing and spam for free (Score:4, Insightful)
Trouble is how many CIO understand the technology they supervise enough to make a good business judgement?
The one thing I will tell them follows like this:
Trust your own I/T staff for maters of technical choice and direction, they have the most to gain, the most to lose and have to live with the consequences. Vendors know how to sell problems then the solutions, users know how to blame their lack of patience and personal issues on computers. I/T personnel often are the ones to eat the heat on organizational issues beyond their control. This includes the flawed systems we use today. Let I/T participate in business descisions, not to rule but nor to be a door mat for the next irrational business type having a conniption fit.
POP? (Score:3, Insightful)
SMTP and POP
Now, nothing against educating management... but POP? POP doesn't belong in the enterprise. Even at home I have my own IMAP server. POP is a relic of the dialup-time where you only had access to your own computer and nobody else (seemed) to have one.
A shame that gmail doesn't support IMAP, I'd prefer it that way instead of that poor POP3 hack they use...
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Where I work we can use either. Inboxes on the mail server have a 16MB limit and they regularly fill up. Because I need to keep more than that I use POP.
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16MB? Wow... That's suckitude pure... My personal mailserver can cope 2Gig, and that's only because the /var is a separate partition of 2Gig. I don't know what it is at work, but I haven't reached it yet.... I get those funny videos all the time, but I delete them at once, so my space usage isn't all that big. Haven't heard complaints of the management types yet, so I think that the limits are very reasonable.
Frankly, tell IT to buy a few disks.... 16MB is about what I had as a student at the Univer
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As a matter of fact, it is. Each backup diff file is compressed, encrypted, and stored on a server, every day.
People work from home and the road all the time. I've done it myself. You bring your laptop home with you, and tunnel into the company network via a VPN. People on call are issued Blackberries, and special accounts that expand to fill their needs. These people are in the extreme minority.
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You can have some of both (Score:2)
This is misleading. There's no reason one spam filter cannot provide both higher sensitivity and higher specificity than some other inferior spam filter. Once you pick a filter then, yes, there is a tradeoff in selecting your decision boundary.
Why Is It? (Score:2, Funny)
Beware the combination of spam and UETA (Score:2, Insightful)
There
Five Things Everybody Needs To Know About Spam (Score:5, Informative)
1. Content filtering is not a solution.
I hate to say it, but it's the truth. Filtering mail based on what's in the e-mail message is a never-ending battle that does not work. It slows down mail service, causes legitimate mail to be blocked more often than using RBLs, and violates peoples privacy, costs more money to maintain and makes the mail system inherently less efficient and reliable.
E-mail used to be instantaneous. Now it isn't, because all the major ISPs toss their mail into big queues where they go over it and file it away or pass it on. If you send something to a Bellsouth users nowadays, they *might* get it 6+ hours later! Stupid, content filtering doesn't work and creates worse problems.
2. The Spam problem is mostly a law enforcement issue and not a technological issue.
99.9% of spammers break the law. The reason why spamming is such a problem is because national and international authorities won't get off their lazy asses and prosecute the spammers for the laws they break. In the end, you'll do more to reduce spam by petitioning your local district attorney to prosecute spammers than installing some obnoxious cpu-chewing filter that will become obsolete within two weeks. And no, the jurisdiction issue is bogus. Technology exists to track all these spammers right back to where they are. There are spammers all over the world and especially in the U.S. that can and should be in jail right now, but they're not because the Feds are more interested in going after people like Tommy Chong. Call your D.A. Call your Congressman. Complain that your reps aren't putting these guys in jail.
When I say "spam" I mean the big spam operations. The industry can easily police itself of low-level, incompetent opt-in schemes, but that's not the real "spam" problem we're talking about.
3. Don't listen to the anti-virus/anti-spyware software companies.
These companies make their living off of spam. There is an inherent conflict of interest in relying on Symantec or any other company to be trusted to help deal with the spam problem. They need spam and they'll never do what's necessary to stop spam from becoming more of a problem. This is analagous to why car manufacturers won't build more reliable/efficient cars when they are capable of doing so -- it's not profitable for them. Stop looking to McAffee or any of these other foxes to be trusted in helping you guard your henhouse.
4. Most anti-spam methods do nothing to stop spam, except relay blacklisting.
Spammers steal bandwidth, violate peoples' security, tamper with third-party computers and bog down the Internet. Content-based filtering does not hurt spammers. RBLs do. Relay blacklisting is the single most effective deterrent in the war on spam. PERIOD. No other method both stops spam, and makes it exponentially more expensive and troublesome for spammers to do their job.
Relay blacklisting works. If you don't like RBLs, chances are you just had a bad experience with a bad one. Try a different one or create your own. They work. They work exceptionally well and best of all, they save bandwidth and resources from the spammer's grimy hands. They also have the added benefit of stopping the propagation of worms and punishing irresponsible ISPs who allow their zombie users to pollute the Internet. There is NO BETTER THING CURRENTLY you can do to combat the spam war than by feeding and using RBLs (aside from following #2 and complaining that spammers aren't being prosecuted).
5. There are not that many spam operations. The spam epidemic is not unstoppable.
The amount of spam going around on the Internet has increased but only proportionally to the amount of user and bandwidth growth, and not due to more and more people getting into the spam business. A cursory examination of most spam clearly indicates that there are
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Content filtering is not a solution.
Yes and no. It's not the "right" solution, but when all other available solutions have been exhausted, content filtering is better than the alternative. You're absolutely correct that it eats up resources - you can't just enable content filtering and walk away; you have to constantly keep writing new rules that will no longer work next week.
E-mail getting delayed 6 hours isn't strictly a problem with content filtering. Sure, if you eliminated content filtering, you'd probably also eliminate the 6 hour d
Re:Heres a way to end spam. Completly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not any more. The stock scammers can get their money without any contact information whatever in the spam.
Parent
mail is broken (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked out how much staff time we spend maintaining and supporting our mail server and was shocked. For a service that's commoditized and available for free from any number of vendors (never mind our uni's central IT service we're already paying for), and I worked out that last year we had spent ~100 hrs/yr of staff time. Looking back I realized that in years previous we had spent far less on a per year basis. IOW: staff consumption on mail service was growing while prices for commodity email service was plummeting (all the way down to near free).
Dumping email support is the only rational solution.
Where will this go? I think email (as in RFC822, etc) is doomed. The protocol is broken. It has no safeguards to confirm the legitimacy of the sender or recipient, no mechanism to secure the communication during transmission (like a real envelope), and as a result the protocol begs to be exploited by Internet fucktards. Which is exactly what's happening. Time to toss SMTP and start from scratch.
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If you really demand a uniform end-to-end authentication mechanism, X.400 is over that-a-way.
A full blown information war is being waged over email, and it's surviving quite nicely. I eagerly await your perfect solution that changes human nature itself. I tire of the pontifications of armchair architects.
Uhh... you can have both... (Score:5, Funny)
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And I am going to ditch my firewall as soon as I get Vista because Bill says it will be a secure OS.
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Question (Score:2)
Spam fighting can be a source of income! (Score:2)
When it starts costing spammers more money than they make, they will stop. In my experience, asking spammers to stop nicely does not work. Filing a lawsuit usually is the only way to get them to stop. I have one spammer that still spams after get
So, don't use verizon.com, etc.? (Score:2, Insightful)
If CIOs instituted a policy of disqualifying any vendor of Internet, data or communication services that appears anywhere on Spamhaus's top 10 list from doing any business with the company, Varshavchik feels, "the spam problem will pretty much disappear, mostly overnight."
That list (http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/networks.lasso ) has verizon.com, att.net, serverflo.com, xo.com in spots 1, 2, 3, 4. Should CIO's stop using Verizon, ATT and XO until they clean up their act?
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Should CIO's stop using Verizon, ATT and XO until they clean up their act?
Yes
1 Thing the Boss should know about Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Voila!
All Spam problems solved instantly.
Neat side effect: Your emails are safe and contract proof.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say use PGP internally and enforce it, and include it in your spam rules. That way, clients who send encrypted/signed messages can be sure they get through, but clients are not required to use encryption.
We almost have a Silver bullet (Score:3, Interesting)
We used an outfit called Red Condor. They offered external filtering by setting the MX to systems on their network, plus in-house filtering by way of an appliance that you can purchase and deploy. They allowed us a 60 day trial, which went extremely well. The bottom line is this, we now pay about ~$11k a year for ~10k mailboxes and get filtering every bit as good as what you get from the major email players like Gmail or Hotmail. The only downside is there are occasionally delays of up to 15 minutes. Hence it is almost, but not quite a Silver Bullet. These are issues that I expect can be somewhat resolved by purchase of additional appliances and load balancing.
This sounds like an ad, but I have no affiliation with Red Condor beyond being a customer. Spam and it's associated problems made 2006 the worst year of my 10+ year career and probably had contributed to more sleep deprived nights than any other thing for me. If you're like me and looking for a solution to what has become an epidemic, this is could be it.
Everyong saying Content filtering doesnt work? BS (Score:3, Interesting)
How can you say that knowing that Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL all do extremely effective content filtering? They aren't perfect but they're very very good with a low false positive rate.
Silver Ricochet.. (Score:2)
1. Sending email gets infuriating as your machine slows to a crawl anytime someone hasnt whitelisted you.
2. Maintaining a Taint Free Whitelist gets to be a bit tricky.
3. How is this going to work for services like Gmail and Yahoo? A minute of chug time on a machine is expensive if your offering it for free. If you whitelist them it doesnt do much good because then spammers just use those accounts
4. How does this work for people in poor areas
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Let's also consider mailing lists. I manage a site that has tens of thousands of users, running on two MX boxes and one outbound SMTP box. I'd have to get a whole new RACK to handle the load
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That is such a small number of users, that you anecdotal evidence is meaningless.
You don't get spam because you don't have many users sending mail, your users are in a controlled corporate environment that (probably) keeps their machines virus/trojan/spyware free, your users probably are somewhat careful to only use their "work e-mail" for "work-related" stuff, and you have a domain that isn't very widely-known.
Try running an ISP with hundreds of thousands of