ASP-Based Solutions

If you’re content to relinquish control of determining what is and isn’t spam to a third party, and if you’re not worried that the third party’s spam filtering infrastructure will go down, an outsourcer may be right for you.

"For small and medium-size businesses, [spam-filtering] is a tremendous amount of work to do yourself, even with a reasonably good tool, and the better tools are expensive. If you outsource, you get the best tools for a lot less effort," says Graff.

Many of the spam-blocking services from outsourcers such as Big Fish Communications, eDoxs.com (which resells Brightmail’s technology), MessageLabs, Postini, Syntegra and United Messaging use the same techniques as local filters. The only difference in the outsourced model is that you don’t have to buy any hardware or software. You do, however, have to change a few of your network routing and domain name system records so that your messages first stop at these service providers, says Giga’s Penn.

The advantages of outsourcing your spam filtering include not having to devote your IT staffers to what can be a time-consuming task and not having to give up processing power while your server determines which messages are spam and which are legit.

Steve Paskach, vice president of IT for Quadion, a small, privately held manufacturing company based in Minneapolis, chose to outsource his spam management to MessageLabs because, he says, "The level of service and effectiveness that this solution will give me for the price is actually a better value for the size of my organization."

But if your company is big and processes huge amounts of mail each day, an outsourcer’s infrastructure may not be scalable enough to handle your mail volumes.

"A lot of outsourcers have a total mail volume for all of their customers that’s a fraction of what we push," says the energy company’s Giaramita.

ISPs

Industry experts agree that ISPs should do more to prevent spam from entering corporate networks. And, in fact, some are stepping up to the task. AT&T Worldnet, BellSouth, Comcast, EarthLink, MSN and Verizon Online rely on Brightmail to filter spam. But unfortunately, there’s not much more they can do.

Expecting ISPs to be responsible for preventing spam puts them in the difficult position of distinguishing for each of their customers what is spam and what is legit. Ditto for the ASP model. If ISPs mistakenly identify a legitimate e-mail containing the word breast as spam due to a superficial keyword search, they’ll wind up hampering cancer groups’ efforts to organize fundraisers, according to Graff. And when ISPs generate those kinds of false positives, they risk angering their customers. (If a customer suspects that its ASP has mistakenly blocked a legitimate message, the ASP should be able to find it, as long as it logs every message that comes in.)