When filtering emails coming into your organisation, one thing you have to decide upon early on in your design is what to do with all of the email determined to be spam. Several factors may need to be taken into consideration before you decide what to do with spam: do you delete all spam messages, or do you move them to a quarantine mailbox?

Administrative Overhead

Moving email into a quarantine folder might seem like the only option (and for some businesses, it will be) but there can be significant administrative overheads involved in parsing this spam trap for false positives. Someone will need to be tasked with regularly reviewing the quarantine folder, releasing messages that are false positives, and emptying the folder of actual spam. Otherwise, the help desk will need to process tickets every day to search for a message that never arrived, even though there are many reasons why it might not have (other than being flagged as spam). Consider an antispam solution that delivers spam to a user’s junk mail folder or other self-service area, and that automatically deletes all messages older than a certain number of days to let the users help themselves without using up all your disk space.

Disk space

Speaking of disk space, quarantine folders can get really big in a hurry. Conservative estimates put the percentage of email that is spam at over 50%, with my own experience being closer to 80%. All that spam that you are not deleting has to be stored somewhere, which if not a reason to delete immediately, is certainly a strong argument for a shorter retention period.

Business critical communications

The problem with deleting all messages thought to be spam is that a false positive might be a critical piece of time sensitive information to complete a sales quote, a registration renewal notice, a customer request, or something else that really needs to go through. If you are going to delete all messages flagged as spam, ensure that the business understands the ramifications, and that they can request white-listing for business partners and critical vendors, and that customers can submit requests through a web-based form or through a telephone call.

Delays

Any message that is quarantined somewhere where users cannot immediately access it can lead to delays. Even if an admin reviews the quarantine folder twice a day, those messages are sitting for hours. Deleting messages can be looked at as a reduction in delay for any messages that are expected, as they either get to the inbox or they don’t. For messages that weren’t expected though, the delay may be days long until the sender calls asking why they haven’t received a response.

Whichever path you choose, as an email administrator, there are several things you will want to have documented and communicated to your users, including a written policy to cover what the system does with spam messages, what the email team’s responsibilities are regarding false positives, and how users can get assistance with either checking the ‘spam trap’ or whitelisting critical business communications. Having these policies in place and communicating them to the user base will help ensure everyone is informed, aware, and understands what is happening with email.

Do you delete, or quarantine? If you quarantine, do you dump it all into one place, or send it to the users’ junk mail folder?

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To Delete or to Quarantine? That is the Question

Change management committees ensure there are standards in system modification procedures. Other administrative committees keep company operating procedures standard. There is much long term value in standardization. This results in efficient company operations that directly impact the company bottom line.

Something as simple as creating an email address should not be exempt from company standardization. Often times this is not the case. I’ve seen companies that allow employees to pick their own email address, use only their first name in the address or change their email address whenever it suits them. The end result makes life very easy for spammers and creates support nightmares for email administrators. Helpdesk calls increase with people complaining about the spam filter not working, because they are receiving tons of spam.

As an email administrator, your role dictates fearlessly stepping up to the plate. Ignoring objections, champion email address naming standards that:

• Maintain a professional company image
• Provides a naming convention everyone follows
• Prevents vanity email addresses from being created by employees
• Are unique, but make it extremely difficult for spam machines to guess
• Makes it easy for current and future administrators to maintain uniformity in creating email addresses

Certainly you have more control if you have the opportunity to implement an email system from the beginning. If you inherit administration of an email system, it’s more difficult to change email addresses. There are ways you can build a case for getting management authorization. Your spam filter logs are excellent tools for presenting reasons why email addresses need to be changed.

Your job is many times harder, if email address naming standards are not implemented and enforced by senior management. It is definitely worth the extra effort.

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Vanity Be Thy Email Name

Being blacklisted can temporarily put a chokehold on company communications. It’s like being an innocent person on a spammer wanted flyer in the post office. This situation can have a direct impact on company profits.

Not locking down your server to prevent relaying is not the only reason an email server can be blacklisted. Although there are many reasons, at this moment it’s not important why this happened. What’s important is to quickly coordinate getting your SMTP server off the blacklists.

Right now all company eyes are on you as the email administrator to resolve this “high impact” issue. Despite the yelling and screaming, which can occur from executive powers upstairs, stay calm and focused on getting your email server off the blacklist. This is a serious situation that needs to be resolved expeditiously. Take a deep breath and start contacting the RBL sites.

How to Get Your Email server Removed from a Blacklist

1. Make this a priority task. Every minute counts. Your email senders may start receiving bounce backs, because other servers are rejecting your server’s connection due to DNS/RBL lookups.
2. Identify which RBL sites have your domain/IP address blacklisted.
3. Follow the blacklist site process exactly to request getting your server off the blacklist.
4. Make sure the tonality of your request is polite and humble. Clearly explain no one in your company would deliberately send spam. The goal is to convince the blacklisting site, your company is not in the business of sending spam.
5. Repeat this process with each RBL site, which lists your server.
6. Once the server is off all the blacklists, now you can review with your team what caused this situation. Then implement proactive measures to prevent his from happening again.

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Being Blacklisted Can Choke a Company