I usually write about topics that represent potential risks for your business, opportunities to improve productivity and new ideas that might set you apart from your competitors. But sometimes I just write about a technical challenge I’ve personally faced. For example, at the end of December last year, I finally decided I needed a better approach to dealing with spam (unsolicited commercial email).
Individuals with a single email address and larger companies with multiple addresses will take different approaches to the problem. Both can subscribe to filtering services that process email for spam before passing it along. An individual might buy an email program like Eudora, which has a built-in spam filter. In fact, that’s what I’ve been using up until now. Eudora has a pretty good solution, but as the worldwide volume of spam has increased, I’ve found it hasn’t been doing as good a job as it used to. (Caveat: I admit to not using the latest, greatest version.) For businesses with a lot of email traffic, a dedicated solution like Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall (www.barracudanetworks.com) may be the best answer. But whether you’re an individual user or a business, there are a number of important things about a spam solution.
Low maintenance. You already spend plenty of time dealing with the email you actually want to read, so adding rules to your spam filter is something you shouldn’t have to do. Ideally, a spam filter comes with an extensive set of rules to start with, and it will automatically update those rules to remain effective over time.
Few false positives. A false positive means a piece of mail that you wanted to receive gets classified as spam. Ideally, the false positive rate for your spam solution is 0 percent—meaning every “good” message makes it into your mailbox. Unfortunately, even a 0.1 percent rate for false positives means that one out of every 1,000 good messages will end up incorrectly assigned to the junk pile.
Acceptable level of false negatives. A false negative means you get a piece of spam in your inbox. Individual tolerance for these mistakes will vary. In practice, you may see a burst of spam in the interval between spammers discovering a new approach to slipping their messages past a spam filter and the spam filter being updated to recognize the problem.
Whitelisting/blacklisting. Whitelisting means email from a particular sender should automatically be classified as “good.” Blacklisting will ensure messages from an identified sender are automatically classified as “spam.” You should be able to assign both individual email addresses (newsletter@ibm.com) and entire domains (such as any messages from stinkymail.org) to either list.
Automatic whitelisting. This ensures replies to messages you send are automatically given a free pass to your inbox. Presumably, if you sent a message, you’re interested in replies.
Spam review. Because even the best filters will generate an occasional false positive, it’s important that you can review your “spam box” and recover messages that were incorrectly classified.
For personal email, you may choose a “challenge/response” system like SpamArrest (www.spamarrest.com). When an unknown sender sends mail to you, the system delays delivery of the mail to your mailbox and sends a message back to the senders asking them to authenticate themselves (this is the challenge part). Usually this involves clicking a link and/or typing a passphrase. Only a legitimate sender will provide a valid response to the challenge. Spam sent from a fraudulent addresss will never receive the email, and automated spam-sending programs can’t pass the authentication process. Automatic whitelisting is an absolute must for challenge/response systems—unless you like the idea of annoying first-time recipients with a “challenge” message.
Unfortunately, challenge and response is not an acceptable solution for a business, since you actually want to get email from people you don’t know (since they’re potential customers). But if you’re experiencing more than one spam message per employee per week, you should look into a spam solution.
For businesses, spam filtering services are typically priced between $25 and $50 per user per year. The entry-level Barracuda networks device starts at $1,500 per year. So if you have more than about 30 mailboxes, it makes sense to consider a dedicated device.
As for me, I signed up with Death2Spam (www.death2spam.net) in late December, hoping for a spam-free 2007. My choice was based on the recommendations of several smart friends who have used and recommended it. Over the past 38 days, I’ve received 55,079 messages (yes, almost 1,500 messages per day). Of these, 86.5 percent were spam. Thirteen percent (a little more than 7,000 messages) were good, and the remaining half-percent were viruses (which are automatically deleted). I’ve had a few false positives and negatives to deal with, but basically, I’ve forgotten about spam.
The cost is $35 per year for my personal mailbox; it would cost slightly more if I wanted it to handle all my domain mail. There are alternative solutions out there (just Google “spam filtering service”). Red Condor (www.redcondor.com) is a North Bay company used by both local law firm Friedemann & Goldberg as well as Sonoma Country Day School. It costs about $25 per year for each mailbox.
Switching to Death2Spam took me all of about 10 minutes. It required a quick signup on its site and a minor change to my email program to tell it to retrieve mail from Death2Spam (which picks it up from my normal mail server). It offers a 30-day free trial, and if you don’t like it, switching back is as simple as undoing the change to your mail program. Best of all, my spam-free life is well worth it.
Don’t agonize too much about which service is the absolute best. If spam is an aggravation to you, any reasonable solution will be a major improvement. Go for it!
Looking for feedback
One challenge of writing this column is that I don’t get a lot of feedback. If you have any sort of technology issue with your business, please drop me an email with your questions. Chances are if it’s an issue for you, it’s an issue for other NorthBay biz readers and would make a great starting point for a column. Thanks!
