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Jamming spam
By Tanya Marchenko
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Investment opportunities, discount Viagara, low mortgage rates and revolutionary new weight loss plans. These are just some of the unsolicited e-mails, or spam, that flood our computer Inboxes on a daily basis.
Spam is more than a nuisance. Enterprises of all sizes bemoan the productivity and network capacity lost to unsolicited junk e-mail. Employees waste time either reading or deleting these notes. A survey by Message Labs, a managed e-mail security service provider, found that 45 per cent of managers who receive 50 or more e-mails a day spend at least 10 minutes hourly dealing with spam. On top of that, nearly 20 per cent of mail server crashes result from an influx of spam. It also consumes expensive bandwidth by crossing the networks of its recipients.
Everyone from professional spam fighters to network administrators are looking for ways to detect and block spam. The goal is to stop spam as close as possible to the enterprise perimeter.
The Agency’s IM/IT section started seeking a solution to the spam problem in January 2004. A number of software packages were considered. Only one, “I hate spam,” proved to be compatible with the complicated structure of the Agency’s e-mail system.
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Later that month, the IM/IT section implemented a spam filtering service on all of the Agency’s e-mail servers. The software stops unsolicited e-mails before they reach the user's Inbox and then redirects them into a special mailbox.
"Our Agency, like many other companies, is dependent on e-mail," says Martin Cayer, Network Support Administrator. "We could not fully implement the solution until we knew it was going to block spam and let legitimate e-mails go through."
During September, the Agency’s e-mail system received 148,534 Internet messages. Forty-four per cent of them were identified as spam.During September, the Agency’s e-mail system received 148,534 Internet messages. Forty-four per cent of them were identified as spam.
“Spam was becoming a real concern to me as I spent more and more time vetting dozens of messages every day to identify and safeguard legitimate e-mails,” says spam victim Gilles Archambault. “Monday mornings were the worst. I really appreciate that the CFPSA IM/IT section aggressively tackled this problem by trialing and implementing solutions at the network and individual account level.”
“The efficiency of most spam filters ranges from 70 to 90 per cent, says Cayer. "Even though we are catching about 2,000 pieces of spam a day, we encourage users to forward spam to spam@cfpsa.com so we can readjust our filters and catch similar messages in the future.”
