Fighting Spam:
We
bet you are just as tired of SPAM as we are.
In an average day, I’m getting more than 200 SPAMs.
Nowadays I use a SPAM Filter – I’ve tried quite a few and
my current choice is IHATESPAM. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well – not too many
false positives and it gets rid of more than 80% of the junk.
I’m only wasting 30 minutes a day on SPAM housekeeping
instead of more than an hour.
Imagine
if I were running a company with thousands of employees!
I’d be frantic. Actually, I am; we all are.
SPAM is wasting our time and money and we don’t seem to be
able to stop it.
Here’s
the latest action, straight from the front lines.
ISP’s
really hate SPAM. That’s
because not only do the have to listen to their users screaming
about it. Not only do
they loose users who just can’t deal with it.
They have to pay for the storage and processing to distribute
this junk that they and you don’t want.
And
the biggest ISP’s have the biggest problem because their size
makes them and their customers particularly attractive targets. That means AOL and MSN have a very big problem.
So big that in site of being each other’s worst enemies
they are banding together and going to the federal government to ask
for help – legislation to stop the SPAM.
Before
you cheer them on you should ask yourself an important question:
Is this a good idea?
In
my experience, the government is good at a number of things, but
making decisions about rapidly changing technology is not one of
them. First, the
government isn’t good at doing things quickly, so any decision is
likely to be made based on already obsolete recommendations.
Second, it won’t be easy to get it changed quickly.
That means if we do get some legislation, we’ll be likely
to be trying to cure last year’s problems while the Spammers move
on merrily to some other way to drive us crazy.
Secondly,
although our legislators seem to not understand this, the Internet
is an international infrastructure.
The U.S. government can do anything it wants but without
international rules and enforcement it won’t much matter.
Spammers will simply move offshore (many of them have
already) and bother us safely from somewhere else.
We
need solutions that are technologically based and that outwit the Spammers at their own game. Here
are a few new ones for you to look at.
MAILFRONTIER
offers a group tool (MAIL GATEWAY), which uses a portfolio of tools
to reduce spam including dynamically, created Whitelists, global
Blacklists (including your own), Intelligent Content Filtering,
Collaborative Community Blocking, and Automatically Generated
Challenges (asking the email sender to do something a
computer-generated message can’t do).
MailFrontier permits IT managers to customize and override
Blacklists and choose to quarantine (rather than discard) SPAM. They also offer an individual desktop tool, MATADOR.
www.mailfrontier.com
CLOUDMARK
also uses a combination of filtering technology and collaborative
community technology (SPAMNET) in its AUTHORITY product.
www.cloudmark.com
IRONPORT’s
SENDBASE is based on the notion of identity rather than content.
Their goal is to identify as many senders as possible as
Known Good or Known Bad and then use content filters on only the
small number left.
They
offer an additional product, Bonded Sender that identifies senders
who will guarantee themselves to be good senders by promising to pay
a fine if they are found to send any spam.
They offer a Gateway product which uses internally generated
and selected public black lists, complaints, logs, and other
information to identify and filter out known spammers.
But
their real trick is their free SendBase web-based application which
allows a systems administrator (or anyone) to look up a suspect and
see if they are a high volume sender.
SendBase will also provide information about the sender’s
domain registration and ownership so the administrator can do
accurate and precise blocking. SendBase will be available March 3 – you can use it without
Bonded Sender and the Gateway appliance, but, of course, IronPort is
hoping you’ll let them show you why you’d like to use them all
together. www.senderbase.com
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