5 Things the Boss Should Know About Spam Fighting 168
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.'"
WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Blue Frog (Score:1, Interesting)
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.