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When spam should not be spam

Posted in E-mail on April 14, 2008 at 11:14 am

Following up from my previous post When spam is not spam. Dare I say that we think we may have started getting spam under control. Fighting the ever increasing influx of spam (Guess What … SPAM is on the increase) is becoming a hefty challenge but we have come up with a combined approach that is starting to work. This combines an internal employee white-list with a trading partner white-list, a managed spam keyword black-list, an internally managed keyword black-list, a virus checker and several other scans all built into a multi-tier incoming email analysis system. It took some time to set up but the number of spam emails that we know we can delete automatically has increased whilst the number of false positives has dramatically reduced. In real terms, instead of having to trawl through almost ten thousand quarantined emails per day it is down to just over one thousand.

Mind you we now have a new problem. In addition to dealing with “spam that is not spam” we now have to find a way to defend against emails that “should not be spam but are spam”. Imagine this scenario, the internal email recipient is one the white-list, the trading partner is on the white-list, the attachment is an accepted format and the email passes the keywords check but it has a series of joke images and text that then get flooded around our business internally? How do we deal with that? This stuff gets stored in multiple places, archived, backed up, printed out, before being forwarded to ‘x’ number of additional recipients and don’t get me started on those “forward this email to ten of your friends” e-mails. What is that answer? Ask our big important customers to stop sending us spam? I can just imagine the conversation:

Customer: “We will forward our order by email shortly”

Us: “Thank you very much, oh and by the way…”

Customer: “Yes?”

Us: “Would you please tell your staff to stop sending us spam”

Customer: “What?”

Us: “Yes, we don’t mind the nice order but please stop barraging us with all the other rubbish”

It is a surprise that there are large well known companies out there that seemingly have very little policies on dealing with spam sent by their employees.