Successful Spam Filtering

Jeffrey Fulmer

Email is an effective and inexpensive collaboration tool. Since Ray Tomlinson's @ sign helped specify username at host computer, electronic mail has become an integral part of our lives. Today nearly 60 billion messages are sent on a daily basis. Of that total, more than 60 percent can be classified as spam. Productivity gains derived from email are offset by this nuisance.

Electronic junk mail is damaging to both mail systems and employee productivity. Nearly every enterprise is affected by it, yet, according to Gartner Research, only 10 percent have spam-filtering technologies in place. This lapse is not for lack of filtering technologies; there are many products from which to choose. Filtering solutions that fail to consider business requirements, however, will not succeed. This article will examine "best practices" for a successful implementation.

Any systems administrator who has participated in a project in which large numbers of end users are affected understands that spam filtering should not be taken lightly. It affects nearly every computer user in the company. The risks are high, but so are the rewards. If you reduce daily mailbox maintenance by 5 minutes for each of 1000 employees, then you will save the company the cost of about 8 average salaries. Those savings don't include bandwidth reduction and damage prevented by virus quarantine. The line is fine. You can offset savings by deleting a time-sensitive business contract or an important sales lead. One such an occurrence could be enough to derail your entire filtering project. For this reason, it is necessary to examine the environment and the culture into which you plan to introduce spam filtering.

Requirements Gathering

Like any business endeavor, communication is the key to success.