SPAM

Spam use to be a huge issue for me about 3 years ago. We used a software product called mailsweeper. It worked OK but like an anti virus program the definitions had to be updated by us and rules and exceptions had to be put in as well. It was a headache to manage and took focus away from other areas that needed attention. Every Monday or day after a long weekend we would have well over 65,000 emails caught by mailsweeper. It worked good and worked too good sometime. It would also catch a lot of false positives. We had to sift through all the SPAM just to find blocked emails. It was very time consuming.

These days I don't even think about spam. Spam is a word that I forget exist. We have made our entire company very happy when we had MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com)take over and filter all of our emails. They have a very robust multilayer filtering system. Spam, virus and porn also images with excessive skin content. One of the best features about it is that the user administers their own blocked emails. If an email is a false positive the user will get an email from messagelabs saying they have blocked emails. In the notification email their is a login issued by messagelabs so they can go in a release or delete the email. They also have a retention period so the emails won't pile up in their system.

How it works is you have to edit your MX records with your ISP to send all your SMTP traffic to messagelabs cluster. Messagelabs will give you a virtual IP which is a cluster of towers that will filter you emails. Once messagelabs has your emails they will process it through their filters and then forward it to your mail server IP. If you are watching your firewall log you will see entries for MLtower## sending emails to your email server. Best practice is that you will want to set your email server to only sent emails to messagelabs and also only receive emails from them also. This can be done in your firewall and should be able to be done on you email server as well. I use exchange so it is there.

Spam for us is a thing of the past. If you are still (LOL) having spam issues in your company check out www.messagelabs.com or www.postini.com I can only speak for ML but I hear postini is nice also.