Firms Took Decidedly Different Approaches Towards Solving

¶ … 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 opportunities. 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 the two types of messages.

What First Banking Services discovered was that Mail Warden Pro-worked very well. The program proved very successful in filtering email messages and protecting against attachments that might contain viruses. First Banking Services has experienced an almost 95% drop in spam messages.

Meanwhile, Pier One Imports switched from the word filtering program they had initially chosen to a more suitable program. The MailFrontier Enterprise Gateway is positioned in front of Microsoft Exchange as a first inspector of all incoming emails.

The program employs seventeen predictive techniques as it inspects the incoming emails and then decides what to allow through and what to stop. It is effective at a 98% rate. Further innovations allow for antivirus and antifraud capabilities as well.

Finally, Charter Communications chose to use two unique security appliances, both from Iron Port. Those tools include the Iron Port C60 email security appliance and the Reputation Filtering tool. Port C60 allows Charter the capability to divide email senders into a variety of categories; IP address, domain, sender's reputation. The program provides specific levels of acceptance for each sender. Reputation Filtering works in conjunction with Port C60 and it allows the system administrator to determine standards of importance based on the sender's reputation. Any message of poor quality is automatically rejected.

Application

All three companies searched for an answer to their particular spam problem. After discovering what worked (and in two cases, what did not work) the companies have found three different email filtering programs that seem to work well for each of them. Applying the different programs to each scenario allows the firms to address the problem of spam in their own manner.