Saga: SPAM!

All organizations are targets for spammers which most definitely includes churches. There are many different ways that you can get into the crosshairs and you can do everything in your power to keep your email address from falling into the hands of the spammers. But try as you might without some kind of spam filtering you will receive spam.

If you are like me these types of emails are a gnat that never goes away and it keeps getting bigger. We have a very nice amount of spam that is directed at our domain and I would estimate that we get on average 60 spam messages per mailbox per day. Since tomorrow is only a day away and we have about 100 mailboxes it adds up quickly.

If you look across the market there are many different products available in a wide array of packages. When you take a big step back everyone is essentially attempting to do the same thing: identify the messages that are spam. There are a myriad of techniques to do this and a vast array of what to do with messages once they are identified as spam. This explains why there are so many products available. Wikipedia has a great article explaining Anti-spam techniques (e-mail). It is a cat and mouse game between spammers and anti-spammers (very similar to the virus protection market). Anti-spammers try and determine what methods that spammers are using to get past the filters, and spammers are trying to figure out what is blocking their messages and how to get around it. In my mind it is a continuous battle that is difficult to avoid. In some cases I remember reading an article where the CEO decided to rid their organization of email completely. While that might sound nice for an instant, for most people doing away with email is just not practical. Email has become a widely used form of communication and we become dependent on it more and more every day.

When it comes to email and spam our end users really don’t care how it works they just don’t want to have to waist anytime looking at crud that they don’t want.

In the past our church has employed a couple different spam filtering solutions.

1. When I first started at Crossings we used a product from Sunbelt Software called iHateSpam. This product was replaced with the Messaging Ninja which functioned well for us and had little maintenance. While I really liked the name the only drawback to the message ninja was that (due to a configuration on our email server it kept crashing all mail related services) it had to be loaded to the exchange server and was configured as an SMTP synch which crunched our server resources.

2. After I was tired of calling Sunbelt Software support and listening to them blame Microsoft for the problems we were experiencing I decided to cancel my subscription and move to a free solution: Microsoft’s Intelligent Message Filter.
For a while it worked great but updates came bi-weekly and it also ran on our Exchange server using precious resources. Plus there was a period of several months where MS took a break on the IMF updates. I finally got tired of all of the complaints and decided to get something dramatically better

3. I was able to convince administration that you get what you pay for and we were able to divert some monies to our huge spam problem. We are now using a product called IronPort which is an appliance based technology that was just purchased by Cisco. We have a hosted solution for IronPort through a company called MxToolBox. We chose this configuration for two reasons. (1) It wasn’t even close to being cost effective for us to purchase the appliance, and (2) having someone else host the solution removes the administrative overhead from the responsibility of the IT staff allowing them to focus their efforts in other places that cannot be outsourced.
Overall we are very satisfied so far with this solution. Reasons…

a. Someone else manages the device

b. There is no lag in message delivery

c. No overhead on mail server

d. Mail Server independent

e. Virus scanning (inbound and outbound) is included along with message archiving

f. There is no quarantine folder that must be checked periodically

g. The false positive ratio is 1/1,000,000 and I believe that I would agree

The only drawback is the rules are ridged and we have an organization that emails us frequently that got the mark of shame and was on a RBL which keeps us from receiving email from them.

Overview:

Spam is bad but the tool are getting better. Whether you organization has software, an appliance, or a hosted solution to combat spam never be afraid to check out new technologies or have innovative ideas. Spam is here to stay but we don’t have to see it.