24th Jun 2007
Spam in the workplace
It’s not only home users who suffer from the spam problem. Corporations are increasingly worried about the effect spam has on their business. Numerous studies have shown that dealing with spam, and trying to prevent spam, are on the rise - but the activities of illegal spammers still spell disaster for some companies, even those who use spam hardware and spam gateways.
This is because falsified header information can result in innocent IPs and addresses being blocked. BorderWare estimate that over 80% of email traffic from individual organisations is falsified, so that spammers can link their work away from themselves to make tracing them more difficult. Obviously, then, this is an outbound problem, and one that spam law is more likely to fix than simply spam filtering. Shared IPs also cause this problem.
Spam filtering programs that work on IP reputation alone are msot likely to block companies for these infractions, although more advanced spam protection software works in numerous ways, not just restricting itself to IPs. However, this shows that the war on spam is more important than ever. For bigger companies, real-time, subscription-based spam list services can help determine where spam is really originating from and what spam blocking measures to take.
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