Getting Clueful: Five Things You Should Know About Fighting Spam
The battle for your users’ e-mail inboxes probably will never end, but it’s not a failure of technology. Experienced e-mail and system administrators share the key points they really, really wish you understood.
Sam Varshavchik is an independent contract consultant who serves many of the better-known financial firms on Wall Street. He believes strongly that "CIOs should stop giving their business to Internet providers with a bad track record of engaging in spam support services and instead encourage and support—with their budgets—lesser-known but more socially responsible and respected providers of data and Internet service." If CIOs instituted a policy of disqualifying any vendor of Internet, data or communication services that appears anywhere on Spamhaus’s top 10 list from doing any business with the company, Varshavchik feels, "the spam problem will pretty much disappear, mostly overnight." Few CIOs who are considering vendors take the time to do so, he says, and those few minutes can save an untold amount of grief.
Perhaps you’ll take some of the e-mail admins’ advice; perhaps not. But they desperately wish that company management would support them in the endeavor to clean up users’ e-mail inboxes. Fritz Borgsted, a system engineer at Unicorn Communications who also leads the development of ASSP (Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy, an open-source project), believes that fighting spam reflects the quality of life in the digital age. Borgsted says, "A mailbox without spam is like a private restroom; with spam, it looks like a public one."
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