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MSNBC: Offices Remain Spam Free Zones
Makarand writes "Thanks to a good job done by the tech staff and filtering software, office
workers in the US are not bothered by spam mail and the value of email
communications has not eroded. A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American
Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not
for company provided email accounts. This is contrary to the
perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam." YMMV.
In part, certainly, but I wonder how much of the difference is due to the fact that spammers have a harder time getting work addresses. They're a lot less likely to be on public web pages, they're not used in chat rooms and they're much harder to generate by brute force.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I wonder how much the lack of spam hitting business email accounts is because companies install spam filters? Our company throws all inbound email through spamassassin, and it works great.
Good filtering software, along with good filters, really makes the difference.
.cmd? .bat? .vbs? The other 18 I specified? Matched something in the antivirus pattern file? Delete the attachment, regardless of the source.
At work I use a product which allows me to filter on multiple levels:
1. Allow. If it's on the domain list, IP list, or if the message contains any of the keywords in the list, it's allowed through.
2. IP blacklisting. IP address matches? Delete it.
3. Domain name blacklisting. Domain name matches? Delete it.
4. Content filtering. Meets any of the content filters? Quarantine it.
5. Attachment blocking.
Virus infections in the past year? 0 workstations, 0 servers. Number of spams/day before companywide? Averaged about 800 for 25 users. Now? About 20 for 25 users.
Cost of the product? $1500 for the server license for both products. I'm happy.
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I don't do anything to filter out spam. There isn't much spam, though. The only people that actually get spam are those in the IT department who post to newsgroups. I am quite certain that newsgroups are the source of the spam that I get at work. It started within 48 hours of the first time I made the mistake and used my real email address. The problem is that Google archives all of the newsgroup postings, so my email address is forever sitting in an easily harvested place.
Similarly, I currently have an email account with my university, but I use it almost exclusively for academic-related communications, and I've not received one spam email at that address in over a year now. And, I doubt the university has invested much money in spam filters for student email accounts.
Naaaa... you really think spammers are going to look through their thousands or millions of email addresses and remove the ones they think are for corporations? Not gonna happen.
I get all of my spams on my corporate account. I've had it for 6 years, so there's been time for the spammers to find it. Not to mention the marketing folks sign me up for all sorts of trade shows and I get targeted spams.
I've pointed our IT folks to SpamAssasin (which, coincidentally, was written by one of the former IT guys at my company!) but they won't use it as is because they're afraid there's a chance we could lose a single valid email. So I just run an individual version from DeerSoft in my Outlook client.
Interestingly about 90% of my spams are to an email address which has never even been VALID for me at the company, but when we switched to Exchange they entered about 40 different email addresses for me consisting of all sorts of permutations of my name and initials and lots of THOSE get spam. I need to configure my spam blocker to block the one offending recipient... gotta remember next time I'm in the office.
with an HTML enabled mail reader, sometimes the first thing they saw was some pornographic picture.
The obvious solution would be to not use an HTML "enabled" mail reader...
May we never see th