Spam

WAYS TO REDUCE SPAM

As Grimes' assessment of the CAN-SPAM Act suggests, strides have been made to curtail the number of spam messages that reach their intended audience. These strides appear to be the result, however, of companies spending time and money on spam filtering systems. The market for spam filtering and blocking services and software has grown rapidly in the last 5 years and is likely to continue growing. And while choice is good, the plethora of anti-spam options can be confusing.

"Before attempting to sift through the various anti-spam approaches, companies should make a few key decisions to help guide their search. Are you comfortable outsourcing your spam headache to a service provider, which means letting your e-mail traffic flow through their data centers before hitting your corporate network? If you prefer an in-house solution, should it sit at your mail gateway to ward off spam before it enters your network, saving valuable resources, or at the mail server where it can perform additional tasks as well? Or does a dedicated appliance that can't be tampered with sound more secure? And what about offerings from established messaging security vendors?" This is how the authors, Cara Garretson and Ellen Messmer, of an article in Network World begin a lengthy review of anti-spam products. Three options exist for implementing an anti-spamming program: anti-spam services provided by a third party; server software that can be loaded onto the company server, and a dedicated server used for this purpose only called a gateway appliance. For most small companies, one of the first two options is probably the most cost effective, the third being costly for smaller installations.

Anti-spam services are a good choice for companies that wish to dedicate minimal information technology resources to handling spam. Providers of this service divert a company's incoming mail to their own data centers, where a number of techniques are used to quarantine unwanted e-mail messages, and the remainder of the traffic is passed on to the customer. The benefits of anti-spam services can be put in place very quickly but over time they may prove to be more costly than a software option. Contracts with service providers usually cost between $1.50 and $4.00 per e-mail account per month after the minimum monthly charge.

Spam filtering software packages vary and provide a differing level of functionality and customization options. Anti-spam software packages usually sit at a company's mail gateway to filter spam out of the incoming messages. These products give companies many options for handling spam once it's caught, options like quarantine areas managed by end users where spam messages are held. Many products also offer lists, which dictate e-mail senders that should always be blocked and those who should never be blocked, respectively.

Other actions which can be taken to reduce the volume of incoming spam messages all have to do with limiting the ways in which your e-mail address is exposed to the public. Spammers obtain e-mail addresses from a wide range of legal sources, including business cards, newspaper articles, Web pages, member lists, customer lists, and message postings. They even collect jokes, chain letters, and other frequently forwarded e-mail messages that have hundreds of addresses on the top. Prudent rules to follow to minimize e-mail address exposure include: never replying to an e-mail message from spammers, even in order to use their "opt-out" buttons; hiding the addresses of recipients if you forward e-mail messages to large groups of people, and not including linked e-mail addresses in the company Web site.

Finally, it may be helpful to inform your own ISP when you receive spam, so that the system administrator can filter out future messages from that address. Many e-mail programs also feature filtering capabilities. Finally, if you are bombarded with e-mail from a company with which you have done business, or you find out that such a company has sold your e-mail address to a spammer, you can boycott the company's products or send an e-mail of protest to the company president.

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