What can you do about the problem of spam?
The junk mail that comes through your letterbox and the junk mail that pops up in your e-mail inbox have a lot in common. It’s unsolicited and unwanted, and although you can dispose of most of it without even reading it, just doing so wastes time you could better spend doing almost anything else. But what can seem like a harmless irritation when you put it in the bin or delete it from your home PC, takes on much greater significance in a business environment. Unsolicited bulk or commercial e-mail – also known as spam – mainly comes from the US, China, and other parts of Asia, and it is costing organisations serious amounts of money.
Even a handful of unwanted messages can be too many. If 1,000 corporate network users each receive just 20 pieces of spam each day, it isn’t difficult to imagine the consequent waste of time and system resources. But once the spammers have you in their sights, it’s not unheard of to receive 200 or more junk e-mails a day.
So what can be done about the problem? It is possible to stop a lot of spam ever reaching your inbox by blocking it at source. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can monitor account use and block the activities of many spammers. The business world has done an impressive job of convincing national and international ISPs to do what they can to help. China Telecom, Pacific Internet (in Singapore) and Telkom Internet (in South Africa) have all taken practical steps, as have giants such as AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. But many businesses still feel the need to take additional precautions.
Organisations that host their own e-mail servers often implement enterprise-wide anti-spam solutions at the e-mail gateway. Small businesses that have their e-mail hosted by a third party can install an anti-spam solution on their network, while those of you with a computer at home may want to make sure that you have a personal or desktop anti-spam solution installed on your machine.
Choosing from the very many options out there is not easy. You could spend an eternity contemplating Bayesian analysis, detection engines, e-mail content filtering, e-mail firewalls, intelligent messaging filters, and permission-based spam blockers. But even the most sophisticated filters offer only a partial solution, as they are simply software tools that attempt to guess which mail you do and don’t want.
In reality, most purchasing decisions are based on system size and set-up, and on just how far you want to go (and spend) to try to control the problem. Such decisions also tend to be made pragmatically, in the knowledge that the e-mail Nirvana (where you receive all the messages you want and block all the messages you don’t) will remain frustratingly elusive. Because no matter which tool you choose, or how much you spend, you will not be able to totally eradicate the problem.