Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial emails, known popularly as “spam.” Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch email addresses. This leads many email users to submit helpdesk requests to email administrators with the question “How did these people get my email address?”.

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. They set up hundreds of different email addresses.  Then the CDT waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. It should come as no surprise to most email users that many of the addresses the CDT created for this study attracted spam.  What is very interesting is the different ways the email addresses attracted spam. There were also the different volumes, depending on where the email addresses were used.

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One of the main issues with the original development of email is that it was never designed to be secure. The focus of email was mainly to be functional and easy to use. Today these core functions, which made the invention of email successful, are now the root cause of the problem.   Spammers can send millions of messages for a minimal cost.  At the same time spammers can hide or falsify their identity information. For this reason the prohibition to send commercial electronic messages disguising or concealing identity information is included in all the anti spam legislative instruments currently implemented.

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As every experienced network administrator knows, standardization lowers the total cost of ownership. Creating standards lowers helpdesk support calls and facilitates easier maintenance. Companies establish standards for everyone using the same software and hardware. Server hardware configurations are standard for every new application implementation. Each server uses the same hard drive configuration, same memory chips and all software service packs are all the same version. So issues encountered with any server around the world can be easily resolved. Read the rest of this entry »

Consider your email infrastructure as a position which must deflect daily spammer assaults. As a tactical network commander, you must consider 3 fronts:

1. Insuring an email server only focuses its resources on SMTP related transactions. Under the guise of saving money, it’s a mistake to load add-in spam software. Placing this server on the inside of the fire wall greatly improves performance. Although MS Exchange and Lotus Domino software comes with some spam fighting tools, their strong functional purpose is being in the email routing business. So the email server should be configured solely to perform I/O housekeeping processes related to email send and receive. This keeps the end user complaint noise down to a whisper. Read the rest of this entry »