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5 Things the Boss Should Know About Spam Fighting
Esther Schindler writes "Sysadmins and email administrators were asked to identify the one thing they wish the CIO understood about their efforts to fight spam. The CIO website is now running their five most important tips, in an effort to educate the corporate brass. Recommendations are mostly along the lines of informing corporate management; letting bosses know that there is no 'silver bullet', and that the battle will never really end. There's also a suggestion to educate on technical matters, bringing executives into the loop on terms like SMTP and POP. Their first recommendation, though, is to make sure no mail is lost. 'This is a risk management practice, and you need to decide where you want to put your risk. Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream.'"
Because managers are there to manage, not to be technicians. The most effective managers should know something about what they manage, but they do not need to know the details. They are supposed to be "big-picture" people and leave the details to the experts they hire. When a manager knows too much about what they manage they tend to micro-manage and I am sure we all dislike that more than ignorant managers.
Personally I would rather have a manager that gives me the responsibility and flexibility to make the decisions that are within the scope of my job function who knows nothing about what I do and how I do it than one that is more knowledgable but ties my hands when it comes to getting things done. The CIO should dictate the overarching business strategy to the IS department and help ensure that their work helps accomplish the goals of that strategy. The details are for the rest of the department to figure out. Remember, the IS department is a supporting function, no different from accounting, marketing, or HR... it is not the business.
I'm sure I will be flamed for this response, but it is typical of technical people (not just IT, but in all functions) to have disdain for those in charge because they don't know what we know. But it isn't their job to, or else they would have no reason to hire us. A CIO position is NOT a technical position. Expecting a CIO to know everthing going on in the IS department is the same as expecting the CEO to know it as well.
Yeah, thanks. Then when someone fakes my email address as the return address, I get thousands of bounce messages.
Did you miss the part about:
I like to REJECT (not bounce!) spam
If I reject the mail, then you'll only get a message back if your SMTP server was the one that was sending it. If I bounce the mail, then you'll a message even if it was forged elsewhere.
People who bounce spam are almost as bad as the spammers. Rejecting spam is much better than just deleting it because it gives the sender a chance to fix your mistake.