White Papers for International Standards Organization (ISO) 27002 (17799)

Spam Filtering: Building a More Accurate Filter

St. Bernard Software

Spam issues and volume have been escalating in severity for many years. It is one of the key productivity, security and user policy enforcement issues facing small and large businesses today. Large businesses can afford to set up hardware specific, or server side software solutions that while effective, are resource and cost intensive. Small businesses are either underprotected, or rely upon client side, software solutions that don’t meet all their needs. Managed Security Services, or “on demand” solutions have emerged as a clear leader in SMB solutions, offering high end performance, management and maintenance, and minimal entry cost.On average, small business employees manually remove three to seven spam mails per day. If you have 100 employees, this 10 minutes per employee adds up to 16 man/hours per day of lost time. Unfortunately, some spam headings are too interesting for readers to ignore. How many of these emails lead your employees to waste further time responding to or checking out the uninvited promotions? How many of these email promotions are unethical or improper in a business environment? How much of your email server capacity is being used to process this unwanted email? How much of your bandwidth is being wasted on this injurious content? This unsolicited bulk email is commonly called "spam." Spam has become such a problem that it has grabbed the attention of lawmakers around the globe who are now seeking to address the problem with legislation. Business leaders, particularly those with small to medium enterprises, should understand the seriousness of the spam problem, and become familiar with the methods for combating it. Even the open source community has tackled the issue, although the resulting solutions have been hard to deploy.

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