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MSNBC: Offices Remain Spam Free Zones

Posted by timothy on from the perhaps-in-some-other-bubble dept.

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.

3 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad for my users! by bwalling · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:big fish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:We have no real problem either... by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "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."

    One more element that is necessary for big companies (not necessarily your 25 user network) is to block off hotmail, yahoo mail, etc. The company I used to work at had more than one thousand people on the corporate network and most of them weren't very smart about how to be safe when using computers. (And because of corporate policy we were forced to use Outlook + MSIE, which is not exactly safe either.)

    When your network gets sufficiently big, you WILL have lamers that will infect the whole place from infections they got through hotmail. It doesn't matter how good your filtering is in that case.

    When the corporate IT people finally closed off the popular webmail providers, we went from one unleashed virus every 2 weeks to one every 4 months.