Having three small children in the house there are a few words we don't use. One of those words is hate. As this is more of a "grown" up forum I will tell you why I hate Spam. And I do not use this word lightly. Incidentally, pickles fall into the hate category as well. Spam and pickles. I despise both and think the world would be better off without them.

I am an self proclaimed email addict, but not nearly as bad since I have retired my BlackBerry. I still lapse into recession, so when seeing I have 52 new messages and only 1 is real, it is maddening. On a business front, Spam is spreading like a plague. The IT fellow at work not only has to worry about hackers trying to break into our firewall and steal the company secrets, but the social engineering attacks and malware that comes in the form of Spam. This Spam brings these attacks behind the firewall directly to the non security minded users. This is discerning as now thwarting attacks moves from the firewall and perimeter to the desktop. Yes, desktop security is important and defense in depth is very important but email attacks are different, they attack the thinking person. If rotten email get to your employees and they have to make a decision if the email is real or fake, the risk inside your network has increased greatly.

The best way to fight Spam is to apply Anti Spam technology at the email gateway level and/or the desktop level and make sure your employees are aware of your email acceptable use policy. Both will help protecting your network, business and employees from Spammers.