Combating Spam
The phenomenon known as spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages.
The California legislature has found that spam cost United States organizations more than $10 billion in 2004, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software and manpower needed to combat the problem.1
According to NewScientist.com, a study released in November 2006 found that spam now accounts for 91% of all email and that over the past 12 months, the daily volume of spam has risen by 120%.
Spammers use large networks of hijacked computers, known as botnets, to send out their spam. Most of today's spam comes in text or html format making it easy for spam filters to scan for keywords and phrases. However, spammers have concieved a new method of spamming. Spam embedded in images in an effort to thwart traditional spam filters. Fortunately, the Open Source community keeps up with current techniques and have introduced techniques using Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, to analyze the content and properties of images to distinguish between normal mail and spam. The image at the top left is a sample image consisting of content most people would consider spam.
How much productivity has your organization lost due to spam? Can your organization continue to lose this much productivity? Most importantly, is your organization prepared to combat this new, and increasingly popular, method of spamming?
The Battle Begins at the Mail Server
A simple search on Google for spam blocker produces an endless list of possible solutions. Determining which solution is best might not be as simple. A deeper look at this list also shows that most spam filters are plug-ins or addons to Outlook and other similar email clients.
The battle with spam begins with the mail server that sends and receives (routes) email to and from your network, not with the email client used to read email. When you deal with spam at the email client level, the only one that benefits is the user reporting and the client being used to report. This is unacceptable for those who check the email on the go and/or from different computers because each client requires some sort of independant spam filter. While it's possible to share those independant spam filter databases amongst different clients, why let spam enter your network in the first place? Each spam message that enters your network must be processed for delivery consuming bandwidth, CPU cycles, RAM and disc space. Why waste these resources on email destined to be deleted without even being read? The simple answer is that you don't have to.
UME/UBE/UCE (Unsolicited MASS/BULK/COMMERCIAL Email) filtering at the MTA level, known as greylisting, can help reduce the amount of spam sent to your mail queue thus helping reduce the amount of spam that enters your network and finally to your user's mailboxes. Since no system is 100% foolproof, we introduce SpamAssassin and ClamAv to catch spam and/or viruses (respectively) that happen to pass UME/UBE/UCE checks at the MTA level. So, at the very least, most spam will be delivered to a special spam folder for each user to view if so desired.
By implementing UME/UBE/UCE filtering at the MTA level, your organization and all of your email users benefit because most spam is blocked before it ever makes it into your network.
Our Mission
We here at G&J Technologies have spent several years studying and analyzing email and spam and compiling the best available software to combat this growing problem. Our mission is to provide small to medium sized organizations, throughout the Truckee Meadows area, and beyond, with this software for in-house email services to combat spam efficiently and inexpensively.
We start with the GNU Linux meta-distribution Gentoo and a wide range of Open Source software known for industry standards to keep costs low and within your budget such as the MTA Postfix, Courier-IMAP for IMAP/POP3 services, SpamAssassin for spam filtering, ClamAV for virus scanning and SQLGrey for MTA level UME/UBE/UCE filtering. Because we use open source software licensed under the GNU/GPL, there are never any licensing fees or purchasing requirements, including upgrades. Open Source software is chosen for reliability, availability and because thousands of programmers world wide contribute their free time to provide the best possible software solutions for UNIX environments, free of charge.
In addition to providing you with vital tools to combat spam, we supply you with graphical tools to monitor your email services as can be witnessed in action here.