Firm clips spam's wings

Dennis Geoffroy has read most of the reports about the growing problem of spam--about how spam messages now outnumber legitimate e-mail (14 billion spam messages sent daily, according to one report); about how U.S. companies are spending billions of dollars fighting spam and e-mail viruses (Radicati Group says spam cost companies $20 billion in 2003 and, by 2007 that number will increase to $198 billion); and about how worker productivity is being impacted, not to mention corporate bottom lines.

Being vulnerable to various viruses, however, and having employees spend their time sifting through the influx of spam did not fly with the chief information officer at Jet Aviation, West Palm Beach, Fla. The company provides aircraft maintenance, completions and engineering services, fixed-base operations, along with aircraft sales, charter and management on a global basis.

"Spam was a growing problem and the only thing we had to help us manage spam was some filtering at the firewall, which required a lot of maintenance," explains Geoffroy. "After the SoBig and Blaster viruses, matters kept deteriorating to where every user was spending the first several minutes of their day clearing 40 or more spam e-mails before they could get to work.

"Worms and viruses get in here and take not only your e-mail down, but they take all your systems down," he adds. "Because they can generate an enormous amount of traffic on their own, they can use all your bandwidth. It's an open door that needs to be shut and secured."

Not everyone, however, agrees that the spam problem is that big a deal. According to a report on MSNBC, the Pew Internet and American Life Project says spam is not a major problem, blaming a vocal minority with inflating the problem. Meanwhile, a Pew Project survey showed that 5% of e-mail users had ordered a product or service that came to them through an unsolicited e-mail, or more than six million people. Also, 3% of e-mail users in the study said they had provided personal information to those who sent them unsolicited e-mails.

Peter Fader, a marketing professor and spam expert at the Wharton School, quoted in the MSNBC report, says that far too much has been made of the spam issue. "People notice spam because of the negative novelty, but it's not really that big a part of their life," he asserts. "Two years from now, we'll look back on the spam thing and laugh."

Jet Aviation's Geoffroy is not one of those laughing. To solve his spam dilemma, he selected an outsourced e-mail filtering service to catch the unwanted messages. The choice was ContentCatcher from Voyant Strategies.

Geoffroy says the first weekend Jet Aviation went live with ContentCatcher more than three million e-mails were prevented from entering its environment. These e-mails, Geoffroy says, would have used all the company's bandwidth and brought down its server for several days. "It's not just the spam issue, it's protecting us against viruses, as well," he says.

ContentCatcher includes eight different content-filtering and virus-protection engines. Geoffroy says he is confident that the solution effectively filters legitimate e-mail from both spam and viruses.

Mail filtering servers are housed at a Voyant Strategies data center. Once the mail has completed the filtering process, it is sent to a Microsoft Exchange server at one of Jet Aviation's global sites.

"The primary reason we chose this option is because of the low maintenance for the technical staff and user," says Geoffroy. "Many of the other products we reviewed required you to set aside some staff or establish overly burdensome rules, which took more time than what you would save on deleting the spam."

In advance of going live, Jet Aviation contacted key managers to set up a domain-wide authorization list. Managers created a short list of customer and supplier domain addresses with whom they frequently communicated. By compiling this information upfront, notes Geoffroy, miscues were avoided with mail getting held up unnecessarily, and the hassle of relying on users to add specific senders to their individual white lists was eliminated. Once the main list was compiled, users could handle the exceptions by authorizing senders with the click of a button.

"It was really important to us that our customer mail get through right from the beginning," says Geoffroy.

Geoffroy points out that the savings add up quickly when 2,000 employees no longer are being affected by spam. "You're not hassled with all this other stuff, you're not distracted and you can just get right to work," he says, "but while that's important, the biggest benefit is really in preventing the outages."

So, while many fear the worst is yet to come on the spam front, and others say it is a minor problem, Geoffroy is content he has solved his company's e-mail filtering challenge and is not taking any chances with his network.

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EVENTS

[check] BICSI Fall Conference, Aug. 30-Sept. 2, Seattle, offers educational courses for IT professionals, and an exhibition featuring cabling and infrastructure products for the enterprise. www.bicsi.org

[check] Network Security Conference, Sept. 13-15, Las Vegas, features conference events and exhibitions targeting security professionals. www.isaca.org

COPYRIGHT 2004 Nelson Publishing
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