Spam can be blocked, for a price

Corporate Report Wisconsin, May 2005 by Zukowski, Paul

THE CRUEL MATH OF SPAM IS THAT IT ONLY COSTS a spammer about one-hundredth of a cent to send an unwanted commercial e-mail message. So if only one in 100,000 messages results in a sale of $11, the spammer makes a profit. No wonder spam has grown to be as much as two-thirds of the Internet's e-mail traffic.

Meanwhile, at many businesses, employees are spending increasing amounts of time deleting spam from their inboxes. If it takes an average of 10 minutes a day, that's a total of $650 a year of time wasted per employee at an average of $15 an hour. That's really a shame, because good spam-blocking software starts at about $26 per employee per year.

Trouble is, many companies don't realize they can do something about spam, or don't know who to turn to.

For some companies, the easiest method is to rely on their Internet service provider to do most of the work. At TDS Telecom in Madison, for instance, they use Symantec's Brightmail to eliminate 55% of the 20 million e-mail messages received each week.

TDS Product Manager Jason Tennyson says Brightmail is the choice of all the top ISPs, and the sales literature says it uses 17 different filtering technologies that only produce one false positive per million messages screened, so spam can be deleted without review.

Sounds good, but here's the catch: You have to have a dial-up or DSL account with an address ending in @tds.net to take advantage of this filtering. If you are having your e-mail delivered directly to your company's e-mail server, it is not being filtered first.

But it could be, Tennyson says. "If you had all your mail managed by TDS, we could clean it initially and then forward it to your mail server, or you could bypass having a mail server altogether and we could manage it entirely. There are costs associated with those options, usually based on the volume of e-mail accounts."

Let's say your company wants to filter its own e-mail and you already have an email server running a common program like Microsoft Exchange. What can you do?

For one thing, you can install Brightmail or a similar program on your own email server. Licenses start at about $26 per employee per year and go down based on number of employees and length of license to as little as $ 11.50.

"Brightmail is a pretty good product," says Joyal Holder, information technology consultant at Kiesling Associates, Madison. "Out of the box it will capture the basic stuff, the Cialis, the Viagra, the hot girls, but if you really want it to work well, you need to configure and fine tune it for your individual office.

"So that's the first step, to try to eliminate as much as possible before it gets to your email server.

"The second step is to allow Microsoft Exchange itself to take off some of that mail that might get past the mail security. Exchange does have some simple filtering rules, and believe it or not, very few people use them. Exchange, if you spend some time on it, can do a pretty decent job.

"The third level of protection, if you're using Microsoft Office, is that Outlook also has a junk e-mail filter that's pretty good. It gives individual users something that they can configure on their own."

Realizing that spam has gone from a nuisance to a major productivity problem, more and more companies are taking steps to block spam right at the Internet gateway, preventing it from ever entering their e-mail system.

Michael Ogden, a spokesman for TDS, says, "You can tell if your company is concerned about spam blocking when you come back from vacation and find 1,200 emails, mostly spam, like my wife did at her office.

"Here at TDS, I will only have relevant messages waiting for me."

Paul Zukowski is editor of Corporate Report Wisconsin, Send comments and suggestions to focus@wistrails.com.