Email Filled with Danger
Spam is no longer just an annoyance that fills your inbox with junk but a serious security risk to your business in many ways. Spam attacks productivity, attacks the identity of your business and staff, and attacks the security of your network. The attack method of Spam shows itself in many guises: ads, phishing emails, scams, links to malware and other fraudulent / malicious attacks.If your employees are bombarded by spam, then they have to determine what is real and what is fake, and that puts your employees and your business at risk. The majority of the spam you get is useless and harmless, but mixed in the pile of junk are emails with web links that could lead to websites that could dupe your employees into downloading malicious code into your business computer network. So, besides a time waster, spam is a growing and a serious security threat.
Origin and Effect of Spam
It is uncanny how the one word can send loathsomeness into any business or IT manager’s psyche. Spam has grown to epidemic proportions and for the time being, the average user will probably not see a decrease in the amount of Spam that finds its way to their inbox. So what do you do?Spam filters have been around almost as long as Spam itself. By doing some research I found that Spam has been around since May of 1978 (a full 28 years). It didn’t take long for enterprising engineers to come up with Spam filters. So which one do you buy? Which works best? What’s right for me?
What to Do?
To put it in perspective, lets assume (since you are reading this site) you are a business owner. You don’t have a large budget, you are a small shop (10-15 people) and your IT department consists of buying the kid down the hall beer when you have a problem with your servers. When we throw spam into the midst, it’s enough to make anybody lose sleep. So when choosing an anti spam solution, you need to decide if you will be using a server side or client side solution.Server or Desktop Solution
Small businesses may outsource their infrastructure and not be able to afford to that brand new Exchange 2007 installation they would love to have. For the businesses that do have a budget and a sysadmin who doesn’t mind taking on some work, server side Anti Spam will help reduce the majority of Spam to your desktop users. The Sybaris (now Microsoft) and Brightmails of the world are fully fledged enterprise grade solutions. “Perfect you say”. That is the way I want to do it. Just be advised that server side systems do not come cheap. Many will run up your bill into the thousands of dollars range, depending of course on your license agreement and platform. Also consider who will support them. Most of the server side solutions require extensive planning to be effective.So for the leaner individuals, you can transfer some of that responsibility to the user themselves. It requires some work on the user’s part, but client side Anti Spam solutions are becoming more popular for small to medium business owners for a number of reasons.
