Slashdot Mirror
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.
I see the crap our managers have to filter out at work. Its not so much external spam as it is internal spam. Example, 10 people discussing what they'll have for lunch in 10 minutes, over 20 emails. CCed to everyone.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I think that home users don't have the resources, know-how, or time to work out an effective anti-spam system.
I can't even find a good IMAP spam filter!
Random is the New Order.
MM(F)V
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
--Signature Spam
Sex - Find It
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...
...because tech workers are embracing it! I mean, why fight spam when it offers to enlarge your penis by 237% in 48 hours? This is truly a golden age of technology! Hallelujah!
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.
Maybe company employees are wary of entering their email addresses into such forms as, "Money waiting for you! Enter email address:" and, "Find out who has a crush on you! Enter email address:".
Of course, we all know what this report means: spammers still have left some rocks unturned, and thus there is room to grow even if internet usage stagnates.
Rejoice!
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.
-----
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.
I get very little spam through my office e-mail. I don't know whether our admins use spam filters, but I have always attributed the low spam rate to the way I use the e-mail address. I use it mostly for internal e-mail, and I seldom give it to anybody outside the company. It doesn't show up in postings to Usenet (in a Reply-to field, for example), I don't use it to register at sites like nytimes.com, and I don't give it to people I don't know. That's not because I intentionally keep it a big secret, it's just a side effect of the way I work - I don't have much reason to give out my e-mail address. I believe that my lack of spam at the office can be credited to limited exposure.
Contrariwise, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who get tons of e-mail at the office.
--Jim
Although I have heard of other people having problems at work with spam, I've been lucky so far. All of our email addresses are easily guessable (prone to dictionary attack) along with alternate addresses being 6 character usernames (prone to brute force attack.
Hotmail accounts on the other hand, my username is not easily guessable, but I received 47 spams and 1 legitmate message in the past 24 hours in my inbox while 9 spams were redirected to the junk mail folder along with 2 legitimate messages.
I wonder if the filters that are used by corporate America could be used by Hotmail, actually I wonder why they are not.
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Now let's see a study to show how much effort IT departments are putting in around the country (or world) to eliminate SPAM in the office place.
I work for a major computer manufacturer (I'll give you a hint, we are again number one in personal PC sales), and I never see spam at work.
But how much money does my company pay a year for me to not see spam?
The amount of spam you receive is directly proportional to the frequency with which your e-mail address is publicly posted. Most offices don't publicly post the e-mail address of their employees, therefore, they don't get much spam. On the other hand, private individuals throw their e-mail address all over the place. Be it registering for some on-line service, or posting on a blog.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
just not for work email addresses. C'mon, who hasn't checked their private email account from work?
Most spammers go after domains that ISP's use. This way they get fewer pissed off people that have their own domains and no how to complain about the spam they get and won't buy anyhting anyways. Since most business email accounts are at the companies domain, they don't get as much spam. Plus people don't use there company email addresses ont he web as much.
Its called 'being on a distribution list'. I get so much e-mail I don't care about, I had to create a rule so that any mail sent only to me is placed directly in my inbox, otherwise it gets moved to another directory...
DILBERT:
Panel 1:
To: All Users
From: Network Admin
Please refrain from frivolous E-mail. It bogs down
the network.
Panel 2:
To: Network Admin
From: Dilbert
cc: All Users
I agree.
Panel 3:
Dilbert says, "Have you noticed there's too much
communication in the world, Dogbert?"
Dogbert says, "Yeah, every day at about this time."
I'd cynically figure that employees hustle to delete or underreport spam that might show they're not using their machine solely for business, like they're supposed to most places. Then, of the charitable view, employees DO recognize they shouldn't be using the their work email for private pursuits and so don't share it. The average business doesn't need its employees roaming the internet, anyway, and there aren't many good reasons to be giving out your work email except to people who you do business with -- hopefully not spammers.
:)
At home, hey, we live closer to the edge. But I object to the stereotype of home users just not knowing how to deal with spam, like it's their fault. Perhasps they should be more careful, but nothing about being carelss makes one "deserve" spam (or fill in crime of your choice). It takes nontrivial sophistication to filter, and anyway stuff gets through. The filters are getting smarter, which is like building stronger locks to keep burglars out, rather than stopping the burglars from trying. Not that spam is anything but wonderful (someone here will say it is); how dare I imply it should be illegal.
Besides, spam can only grow -- it's not going away on its own.
well, the company i work at uses a small web hosting co for mail/www and i swear they sell my address... i almost shat in my seat when one of my [female] coworkers walked by and i was sifting through my mail by pressing the down arrow (50:1 spam ratio) and suddenly an ENORMOUS pair of breasts fills the preview pane of outlook. bit of an awkward silence after that. needless to say, i've been a bit more vigilant about spam filtering since then :)
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
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.
Do you ever get the feeling that the news at msnbc is more for making microsoft look good and less for providing unbiased information to the public?
Last year I rarely got a spam complaint at the office. This year I get them all the time. It's not "innocent" spam either, now it's animated XXX GIF files. I'll be implementing an anti-spam system very soon.
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.
Any time saved in this fashion is wasted when everyone leaves their desk to tell you that you left your cover sheet off this week's TPS report.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
My company's spam filtering software seems to not be able to recognize the fact the email with the following words in the subject Enlarger You Penis are spam. It does seem to tag internal mass postings from the HR dept. as spam though.
My home machine running spam assasin on the other hand never fails to recognize spam.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Everyone needs to check out popfile.sourceforge.net. It's GPL, dead easy to set up and use, and quite frankly, it's brilliant. It uses naive Bayesian filtering, catches about 99% of my spam, and rarely if ever catches a non spam message by mistake. Spammers are going to HATE this tool. Try it. You won't be sorry.
the spam I receive at work from outside the company or the emails from within. First, if it's spam I can usually tell from the subject line. Easy to delete. The emails from within require me to at least read it. And once people learned that they can use nice, pretty and extremely huge, clip art I've found that bringing up that important email to "everyone" is a real time waster.
In addition, far too many people where I work will email a subject to death. Coupled with a large CC: to population along with the "reply to all button" some subjects just won't die the undignified death they deserve. And, you have to read every one because of the odd one that may contain useful information.
I swear, what once took a 1 minute phone call to resolve now results in 20-30 emails back and forth. The only good thing I see is the CYA factor. I've saved my butt a couple of times being able to forward a message that I sent long ago, that apparently was never read. Why wasn't it read? Must have been deleted with along with the spam!
Seriously though, I spend far too much time wading through needless email at work than I do spam.
Or, perhaps, their work-related purposes include having their email address posted publicly to a web page or newsgroup. Or perhaps their email addresses are just easier for the spambots to guess.
This is sort of off-topic, but I'd like to suggest why it is that home users get more spam than corporate users: they don't care. I'm using Yahoo. I simply delete spam. It's not hard. It takes up about five seconds of my day. There is no chance of not receiving something due to filtering. In a corporate enviornment, however, it is different. They pay for the servers, they pay for the [small amount of] productivity lost. At home, nobody cares. Sure, if you were getting 20 spams a day you would care, but most of us are not receive that volume of spam.
A related question to spam: How is it that after I create a hotmail account, within one day, I can be getting spam? Does hotmail sell lists? Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names? Does hotmail try to filter these out?
We use spamcop.net at work. It's gets 95% of the spam. The thing which made us move on it was female employees complaining of sexually explicit spam from porn sites--with an HTML enabled mail reader, sometimes the first thing they saw was some pornographic picture.
Unless a company makes a best effort to protect people from exposure to offensive material (as defined by them, within reason), the company could be sued by the employee for creating a hostile workplace. While I haven't heard of cases of this yet, it's only a matter of time. (I hope I didn't give anyone any ideas here...)
We've been experimenting with spamassassin, and it's roughly as good as spamcop (as to how much spam gets through to the end user), but it's free. Note: spamcop and spamassassin have to completely different approaches to determining what is spam.
Over the course of this weekend, my personal email account has received 7 spams.
Over the course of this weekend, my work email will have received over 50.
A quick googling shows my personal email address showing up twice as often as my work address.
Why, then, do I get so much less spam at home than work? Because the ISP I use is very aggressive about filtering spam, while the IT department at work is deeply fearful that "We might accidently filter a million dollar order" (yah, like anybody ordering a million bucks of stuff will do it SOLELY through email).
True, the above is nothing but a datum, not refutation, but still, the idea that "work gets less spam than home" is not ALWAYS true.
www.eFax.com are spammers
From the look of it, if you're a company paying a geek or herd of geeks to write filters for your mail or have purchased some sort of filtering software solution to screen out the spam, you're still wasting money on filtering spam! Office productivity might be up but the company is still having to spend $xxxx.xx on a filtering solution, which I'd bet doesn't offset the increased productivity.
Also, don't forget the cost, albeit small, associated with missed mail that was flagged as a false postive.
SpamAssassin is ready for exchange.
Deersoft.com
I work for a major games developer, and the only spam I get at work is the spam that goes to the entire company, as somehow a spammer managed to find out our all@company address.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Just because end users don't see the spam doesn't mean there isn't a cost. How much time is spent creating software to combat spam? How many hours do admins spend dealing with spam before it even reaches users? How much time do users have to spend circumventing anti-spam filters to send/receive legitimate email?
These are just a few of the obvious costs related to keeping spam out of user mailboxes. It would probably boggle the mind to know the actual cost of keeping spam out of Suzy or Sammy Secretary's mailbox.
If find it odd that Slashdot posts several anti-MS stories every day and yet then proceeds to post a story linked to MSNBC... Who's side are we on here? Maybe if slashdot was truly anti-microsoft they would refrain from linking to their news network.
.sig to be a professional journalist is bashing slashdot for one of the few things that they do right.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist. I have no tolerance for bad journalism!
Isn't there a principle in good journalism which states that you should report a story without regard for your personal biasses?
I won't try to claim that slashdot is good journalism, but it seems rather peculiar that someone who claims in his
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
At a previous employer, we had no WWW access, so there was no way to enter our address (from work) into any forms. We sure as hell weren't putting our addresses onto any websites, posting to USENET, sending chain letters to friends. It was used for business and business alone. Personal emails? I SSH'd to my mail server.
Personal emails at work were *STRONGLY* discouraged, and it was made clear that the company would read our emails if they ever felt like it.
I never used my work email address for anything. I'd say that 90% of the email I *did* get was company related stuff anyway, which went right into the trash can.
Just out of curiousity, what package cost $1500 and does all of that?
I'm wondering because that's all stuff that I'm doing currently, but it cost me $0 - all free software, obviously.
SPAM does not distinguish between personal and corporate email accounts. What happens here is that most people use the corporate accounts strictly for business related matters and corporate mail, while their personal emails are used for everything else (where the exposure to harvesters is most likely to happen).
I have lots of friends who post messages on the Usenet using their corporate email accounts. Guess the result? Lots and lots of SPAM.
You have got to be kidding! I get about twenty times the spam at work as I do at home. At home I just get one or two a week sent to webmaster, offering colocation, traffic enhancement, and other minor crap. But I work I get hardcore porn ads, Mrs. Mojimbo from Nigera, term life insurance, penile enlargements (add 4 inches!), diets (remove 4 inches!), and some stupid time traveller trying to get back home.
It's all my work's fault, of course. They inadvertently left an open relay in place long enough for us to get blacklisted by the good guys and primelisted by all the bad guys. It's fixed now, but damn! I get about 50 to 100 a day.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Just bford@ford.com (or something like that).
...
It's real easy to tell to because you get
b.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
bill.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
william.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
bford@ford.com (no auto reply so it hit something).
He was real nice though, forwarded my questions to the head of marketing. I was inquiring as to why they don't make a Cobra 2 seater instead of the faster standard mustang body style.
Ford kicks Chevy's ass. GM sucks.
Ford/Jaguar/Volvo/Lincoln/Mazda
hrm, we use complex filtering software and techniques, and i still get lots of spam. i receive about 200 work related emails each day to a certain account, and about 25% of that is spam.
...
what i really wonder though is how many legitimate (non-spams) emails i never receive because of filtering software! i frequently get email or calls from people who claim they sent email that i never received. i also frequently get mailing list bounce warning emails (primarily from securityfocus lists though) claiming that emails sent to me are bouncing. hrm
-- ken williams
We use spamassassin at work, which we've just setup recently.. We've been using pegasus email for years and years. Since the machines were ps/2s running dos 3.x. pegasus doesn't cut down on spam, but there is *no* excuse for email clients such as outlook that can infect your computer with such apparent ease. If you use a client like this, or force it on your users, you are an irresponsible net citizen.
at the place I work we have 3 full time people monitoring an expensive piece of spam filtering software. so if may save a couple of minutes of time off of the other 500 people, those 3 have been pulled from other duties to take care of the task...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Some companies do have amazing filters that will filter anything that is close to spam. But imagine this: a helpdesk/tech support email address. I work for a department like that and spam makes up 90% of my total email. Also, some countries might not have laws about spam and even scams!
Though we might not care about what trouble other countries are in, but consider them as part of the commerce sector, and consider spam servers are mostly located in other countries.
Most only spam ISP's and public email address providers (hotmail, etc). They filter by domain so everyone with their own domain and companies with their own domain have far fewer spams.
I still get spam addressed to my old company's two old obsolete domains (I can't persuade them to turn that off!), plus my old company's current, my current company's current address (I transferred from a subsiduary company, so get to see both email servers) and now both companies are in the processes of changing their domain names again, so it looks like another two servings of spam for me.
Fortunately, I use filters which catch 90% of the 25 or so daily spams.
As comparative data points, my home email (freely used in Usenet, etc) gets about 50+ spam per day, but as I use POBox.com, they kill 75% at the server, and another 20% gets forwarded with a spam tag, to get binned at my home PC.
Oh, and my Hotmail address (an obvious [firstname]_[lastname]) gets almost zero spam, filtered or unfiltered - I think I get more messages from M$ than junk (well, non-M$ junk anyway!)
what i really wonder though is how many legitimate (non-spams) emails i never receive because of filtering software!
That is how the spam war will end: The spammers will become sophisticated enough that no matter what we do, any filter we try to use will result in too many false positives (falsely labelled "spam") to be of any use.
(False positives, of the four possible outcomes, are by far the worst, if you think about it.)
Spam is only going to get worse.
and I'll tell you why. The only reason businesses don't get as much spam compared to home users is because of one difference. The average home user doesn't have an IT department at their disposal to help fight spam. At the company I'm at we still get tons of spam for the same reason home users do. Too many people treating their work account like their home account and signing up for lists and things they shouldn't be. Spam has gotten so bad that we're considering implimenting the silver bullet of spam filtering, TMDA. The only problem is that this is very difficult to impliment and it goes purely on a whitelist only basis. Spam is everywhere and anyone who says differently is either downplaying the problem, or living in a bubble.
The big difference betweem the two is that email spam the brunt of the cost is paid by the reciever, and NOT the sender. The reciever pays for their own email account. They pay their ISP for the bandwidth they use to download the mail. They pay the ISP for the storage disk space that the stuff takes. Most spammers also use "other" peoples servers to send their junk. The spam often has incorrect mail headers that end up causing more load on the servers sending the stuff, cauing more work for those servers and for those that have to handle the costs of "cleanup" and postmaster bounces....
Snail mail spam is paid for by the sender. The content of snail mail spam is regulated by the FTC under certain guidelines. The postoffice is getting paid to deliver it.
--
Time is on my side
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
At least in my office environment, where we've got new Pentium 4s running Windows 95 unpatched (it's an old-school custom-job database/workflow "solution" tying us down).
We get our share of "You've been accepted!" but more common by far is "Japanese lass' sexy pictures" and "A very powful tool" - you know the drill. Our IT people's idea of security is forbidding accessing personal email accounts on the Web.
I'd trade virus emails (which crash Outlook even when you're running VirusScan or similar) for spam any day.
Where I work, we get affected by each Outlook addressbook-reading virus as they come through, even though Outlook is banned on the internal network, with threats of firing employees who use it.
...
Somehow, people don't seem to get the message.
While these occurrences are not common, they generate a huge amount of email.
They also generate a large number of clueless replies from people, asking to be taken off internal mailing lists that have been spammed, or back to the person whose addressbook has been compromised asking them to stop sending messages!
It all comes back to education in my opinion
Explicit emails, graphics or not, are not welcome. What if the same user, using Eudora or whatever received a message with the word "fuck fuck fuck" in the subject line? Still offensive and could provoke "hostile workplace" initiatives.....
That's actually what I do now. A filter for each of my mailing lists (which are all nice enough to use the [abbrev.] convention in every title), and a filter per left-over person that goes into my generic "Keepers" folder.
No spam filtering in terms of what most people mean, but it turns out that unless you have a lot of people emailing you out of the blue (tech support, maybe an Open Source project lead), this means that around 90%-95% of the stuff that *isn't* filtered into a folder is spam, and the percentage is going up every week. That's for my personal account, which is less focused then the average work account, where I think your numbers would hold.
This can't be perfect, but it also can't be fooled or defeated in the general case. It's a hell of a lot less sexy then the latest Bayesian filters, but in another six months, the whitelists will work better.
When I've worked for BBN Planet, they did not do ANY spam filtering, whatsoever. Since I've made a mistake posting a few messages on usenet with my corporate e-mail address (which apparently got harvested by bots), in a few month my e-mail box became overflown with spam for the next several years while I was working for BBN. I no longer make the same mistake since, and all my usenet postings contain completely fake address. The bottom line - some companies do and some companies simply don't care.
Filtering isn't effective if it also blocks legitimate mail, and from anecdotal evidence it seems to do that excessively.
All my friends who work in places that have spam filtering implemented complain incessantly of emails not received, often times important emails on which their work depends.
Oops... itchy "submit" finger. The fact that every individual employee doesn't have to battle spam doesn't mean that its not a problem for business. It only means that the company has hired a $70,000/year person whose entire job is to stop spam. Or bought a ten thousand dollar program that must be constantly monitored.
And I wonder how much non-spam email is going down the memory hole? For instance, take the case of a company that lost significant mail from foreign customers in a classic "Risks Digest" blunder: offensive words in English may be perfectly innocuous in other languages...
See, I get about five times as much spam as real mail on most days. Do I care? No. I spend less than 30 seconds deleting spam on any given day.
So.. let's see.
By NOT spending hours bitching about spam
NOT spending hours tweaking an anti-spam system
and just pressing delete... I figure I save myself a good 20 hours anually, at least.
People waste more time whining about spam and fighting spam than they would fighting it with the most simple method: the delete key.
yes, I disagree with spam. I think it's rude, wrong, and a waste of time. If I had 20x the amount of spam I get, I would probably speak differently.... but as it is, I get 20 or 30 spams a day, and it's not worth the effort to complain.
We could pretend it eats up valuable resources, or we could get real, and realize that the total disk space eaten by all the spam is really very small, relatively speaking. Even if it's 4 or 5x the amount of legitimate mail, it's still nothing.
I'm sure this is due, in no small part, to the excellent software provided by Microsoft. You know, the folks who bring you MSNBC and Hotmail.
Oh.....shit.....wait a minute.....lemme rethink that.
.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
and probably Canada....
Most other countries have a little more common sense when it comes to their women getting offended becuase of a nice pair or a bad word.
Bad words and boobies are reality. If you can't accept that, check out.
This is contrary to the perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam.
So only Americans get spam now? Well that settles it! I'm moving to canada!
...wait...
Sounds to me like their employees' email addresses aren't hanging around that long.
My email address has been public domain for
8 years now... makes all the difference in the
world as far as spam goes.
'sapientia potestas est'
Yeah yeah, blah blah blah...
Get real man. Show me how many of the spam whiners are paying per byte. Show me how the cost of their email account or internet service would be less because of spam.
I work for a Rather Large Company (tm) and was tasked with architecting the mailgate for the entire company. Several requirements:
1) Ingress spam & virus filtration;
2) LDAP directory integration;
3) Message address rewriting on ingress & egress.
See, I was tasked with this when our company merged with 3 other ones, so we had a mess of Exchange and Notes servers out there. The idea was for me (your friendly local Unix sysadmin) to build a single ingress/egress point (my boxes) while the NT admins rebuilt all the exchange & notes servers into one coherent infrastructure. (That's a lot of work with ~40,000 employees!)
Anywho, the way I did it was to install a pair of Sun boxes in our DMZ with Trend Micro VirusWall on it, as well as their eManager product. That handles our ingress spam & virus filtration. That product proxies an inbound connection on port 25 to another pair of Sun boxen that run Sendmail gateways, which, thanks to some custom rules, do the LDAP lookups & address translations.
So we have multiple levels of SPAM & virus filtration -- the Trend stuff is very simplistic, crappy, relatively undocumented code, and works exactly as designed. As much as it looks amateurish to me, I can't help but to recommend it because it Just Freakin' Works. Also, if you're a big enough fish, the folks at Trend are incredibly friendly & helpful -- several of our suggestions made it into the product.
Someone high-up in our organization decided after Nimda and Code Red that all inbound messages with attachments should be quarantined for an hour, because Trend promised virus pattern updates within an hour after a virus outbreak. We were able to graft that on using some shell scripts. Works just peachy.
Between Trend Micro & Sendmail, we've got a GREAT solution that gives us plenty of filters. We have all the spam & anti-virus filters using Trend, and can block or redirect by domain using a mailertable with Sendmail. Also, the LDAP support in Sendmail wasn't very good when we started integrating that (8.10 was the first usable LDAP release), but by 8.12, it works great. We redirect the message internal to the company based on what's in LDAP, and it works flawlessly for ~1 million messages/day.
Tastes great, less filling. And mostly free software (Sendmail was free, as was the Directory Server, since that license comes with Solaris.) All we paid for was the Trend Micro stuff, which we had a site license for anyway since we use it on the Exchange servers as well.
So yeah, I'd have to agree that SPAM isn't NEARLY the problem at work that it is at home. Also, since we got the Exchange servers out of the SMTP business and "just" for mailboxes, we haven't had a virus outbreak since. Lovely!
--NBVB
Worse than that, blocking access to Yahoo will break your employee's access to some of their owner's groups. You know, that impartial third party publishing kind of thing that folks at different companies use to share experience and knowledge that benifits all?
Congratulations on decreasing your rate of virus infection. You might have done better by installing Mozilla and making that your default browser. Is there any bogus policy on that one? I just don't get why some big companies insist on the bug farm that is Outlook.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
does the phrase "reported in this article by MSNBC.com" ring any alarms for anyone else here?
My mileage most definitely varies, and far too much at that.
C|N>K
I have to filter approximately 20 messages daily from my inbox, and they've gotten worse as the holidays approached. I guess everyone out there's hung up on the rampant consumerism and decided that they could "make money at home with your computer" to afford a new bike for Jonny or some other such rot.
Yet you complain when others say that it sucks to not be able to find their mail under a pile of shit. Hmmm, how much of your time do you waste dissing people?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My personal email accounts are spam-free and I'm not doing anything in the way of filtering. On the other hand, at work, where there are supposedly junk mail filters in place, I tend to see about 50%-75% of the email as junk. And that's not counting the stuff that I'm filtering into the Trash folder by filtering on my desktop. (So until the folks running the company's email infrastructure can get their poop in a pile, I can at least deal with it within my mail client.)
As a few other posters noted, co-workers can be the source of an awful lot of junk email. And much of that can be more time consuming to deal with than the obvious spam. Seeing bizaare, Unicode-like characters is a dead giveaway of a piece of junk email and make it quite easy to get rid of. But... the message from HR that contains a Powerpoint slideshow announcing the new look of the HR intranet site actually takes far longer to deal with.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
For years my thinking on spam filters was, "spam is the user's problem". Generally if you are careful about where your email address goes, my reasoning went, you won't be bothered. And, sure enough, I wasn't bothered.
But then I discovered that customers *were* bothered and bothered enough to switch their accounts in order to get email filtering. A bit of rethinking was in order here.
I implemented Message Wall on one of our boxes and had it connect to our regular email box. I figured that this way we could implement filtering and, if we didn't like it, we could move it off with just a DNS change. (The normal installation is to put it on the same box as the mail server but I didn't want to have to reconvert the mail server if I didn't like it.)
Messagewall has worked quite nicely in cutting down spam and email-borne viruses. We've implemented it on a school district too. One of the great things about it (besides "free") is that it has upgradable definitions, it's dead easy to exempt a user from the service, and it's free (did I mention that?).
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
That's basically my setup here as well, except that after virus checking, I pass the email onto procmail to have SpamAssassin run over it. *Then*, if it ain't spam, it get's forwarded to the Exchange server where a second, different virus checker scans it.
I tried eManager, but it was awful. SpamAssassin is much better.
dave
Here's the question for you though ....
:) Does it have a web GUI front end thingy so they can point-n-click rules on and off?
Since I'm the Unix sysadmin, I built this thing. I also maintain the Sendmail piece of it. The NT admins maintain the ruleset on the spam & eManager rules on the Trend server. They use TVCS so they can update the rules on both of our gateways, as well as on the Exchange servers.
Is spamassasin NT-admin-friendly?
--NBVB
...SPAM RECEIVES THE USERS.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... *gasp*... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
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.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA...
Thank you Slashdot for posting this hilarious article. It's almost as good as The Onion. It's nice to end the day with such a great laugh!
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Who TF smoked up this article? Is it just me who gets tons of spam at work?
Oh. Sort of like when I got a mail from stevecase@aol.com asking me if I wanted a larger penis.
Finally, an article that states the blindingly obvious but constantly ignored fact that spam is not about to destroy life as we know it. Can we move on and be paranoid about something else now?
Virtually serving coffee
It's billg of course.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Some webmail type systems have a gui front end for Spamassassin - http://www.horde.org is one.
To be honest, I don't change the rules much, just edit the whitelist.
dave
anyone else with real names that hotmail doesn't like?)
This is known generically as "the Scunthorpe problem". Scunthorpe, BTW, is a town in England. It's not a dirty word, except to regexp matches for c--t.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
That is how the spam war will end: The spammers will become sophisticated enough that no matter what we do, any filter we try to use will result in too many false positives (falsely labelled "spam") to be of any use
At this point people will most probably switch to whitelists or somesort, however I had a horrible thought once when thinking about this.
<horrible_thought>
Another approach other than a whitelist is to include a signature like PGP in the email. This could be placed in the headers of the mail and attached by the mail client. Mail servers could have an option to check these signatures automatically, or the signature can be checked by the recieving mail client at the expense of a bit more bandwidth. Once the clients can transparently sign and verify messages this means that a user can choose to only to accept signed messages (i.e. I don't add you to a whitelist but you need a valid key). These keys need to be managed by some central authority which revokes keys if they are found to be used by spam, therefy causing all the messages sent to be useless.
My horrible thought is that MS is in the best position to offer this becasue of the Outlook/Hotmail dominance. They would call it their spam inititive and ship all updates to outlook with this feature, the next update when the feature is widespread would auto-enable the feature. This would block out most mail to and from non MS agents in the name of fighting SPAM.
</horrible_thought>
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
The real problem with home users is that 0.04% of them (read morons) actually buy the stuff being solicited. Talk about a minority rule. The best anti-spam algorithm is thus: "Don't buy their shit".
;-)
As much as I wish that were true, I know it isn't. Here is why: People still buy get rich quick schemes. This is how the spam mailing list and tools sellers pitch their scheme. "Just think about how you'll feel living in your new luxorious house, being your own boss, never having to worry about money, working the hours that you want to work...How it will feel to have more time with your family... The Amazing Spam-Money-Making System includes 100 million email addresses...."
So, even IF no one was buying from spammers it wouldn't stop new entrants into the spammer business. They just can't seem to pass up that amazing money making oppurtunity available only for a limited time.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Are they a member of the American Association Against Acronym Abuse Alliance?
I don't approve of their methods, so I am a member of the Anti American Association Against Acronym Abuse Alliance Activists (not to be confused with the Anti-American Association Against Acronym Abuse Alliance Activists, some group of Albanians).
Most office workers don't use their work email address for anything much, so no one knows about their email address aside from maybe family and business contacts, of course spam will be lower. Any sort of server-side mail filtering is a gamble, to say the least. If anything gets mis-catagorized, it could be a disaster.... My company has discussed it and decided it is better to let users deal with it than risk trashing legitimate mail.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
- Telemarketers (we need a commercial statewide "do not call list"!)
- Virus hoaxes, cleanup & prevention (yes, we have multiple layers of defense)
- Fraudulent invoice scams (phone, fax, e-mail and snail mail)
- Spam
- Junk faxes
Spam is only #4 on my list of unnecessary time wasters. The telephone will die as a business tool before e-mail does, because it's much easier to filter e-mail than it is to pre-screen a phone call.Maybe this isn't totally on topic, but it is about spam and I just read it hear at work. I just got a spam email about Jesus and how he can save me, including a handy little prayer that will start me on my way, and also a suggestion to go to Google and search on "Bible". There's also a nice little opt-out link at the bottom.
Kind of caught me by surprise. I was expecting to delete my daily share of hot wet teen sluts.
First post is passe. The current trend is posting well informed, insightful (and possibly humourous) comments.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I'm always very careful about not previewing spam email. I try to select all of the messages as a group and delete them. It's fairly easy to tell from the subject and the sender which ones are spam; I don't have to preview messages with subjects like "Barnyard animals!" to know that I don't want it.
Besides, previewing HTML spams only give the spammer the means to validate your email address and keep your account active.
The ISPs are, and that puts up the costs for the customers
What would Lemmy do?
I just started using it about a week ago.
Even after starting with a very small sample of messages to define each bucket, the accuracy of determinations was suprising. Over the last week or so I've been correcting it on the emails it gets wrong. It's accuracy has been increasing dramatically. I havn't had to correct any assessments for the last 2 days.
into the cost of fighting spam.
People keep saying spam costs money. Show me how spam costs money to the isp if they aren't filtering it. How much money, and how much of the total cost.
I don't know about you, but any ISP I've ever had doesn't filter my mail.
You are ranting about spam being evil, but not providing numbers.
Yes, it annoys people. So what. Lots of things annoy people. Once in a while you get a piece of gristle in your KFC burger.. so what.
I want to see costs.