¶ … firms took decidedly different approaches towards solving a problem that continually plagues many companies of various sizes. Those firms included; First Banking Services of Florida, Charter Communications and Pier One Imports and the problem they all three faced was spam email. SPAM email may not seem a likely culprit for trouble but Charter recognized that over fifty percent of the email it was receiving was spam, while Pier One Imports found that over eighty percent of their email was spam. First Banking Services knew that its email was being affected, since many of their emails contain very large attachments, Spam was a major problem in slowing down their communications. All three companies were searching for help in solving their spam problems.

The Problem

With the advent of email, business communications have exploded with many large and small firms receiving a torrent of email on a daily basis. Emails are now considered legal communications and can provide a quick, efficient and timely method for conducting and confirming business.

The problem is that spammers use email to deliver their messages as well. Many times spam accounts for a large percent of emails received and it can be burdensome. Spam takes up time and space, and it must be deleted from email accounts in order to facilitate 'real' business...

Managing spam takes time and money that could be better spent on other business endeavors. As an example, Pier One Imports were required to clear over eighty percent of emails on a daily basis, which caused employee productivity to suffer accordingly.
Charter Financial was also faced with a huge percentage of spam vs. regular emails, and along with First Banking Services of Florida, all three searched for a method to block or eliminate spam email.

The Solution

Pier One Imports decided to use a keyword filter, but that solution was too cumbersome. Oftentimes legitimate messages were being blocked instead of Spam, and spammers were very innovative, oftentimes creating misspellings of words to fool the word filters. Charter Communications initiated a filtering system as well, but it too proved ineffective. Instead of a filter based on words, Charter used open source filters. Neither Charter nor Pier One Imports were impressed with the filtering systems.

First Banking Services, however, selected a spam-fighting program called Mail Warden Pro-from Wareford Technologies, Ireland. Mail Warden Pro-allows users the capability to set custom standards that differentiates between spam and non-spam email messages. The software also provides generic rules that assists the user in distinguishing between…