Spam Control

Into Thin Air

The war against spam is never ending, but battles are being wonas carriers turn to interdiction services to block millions ofinappropriate messages.

Businesses don't allow solicitation to be done within theirwalls, yet many companies do little or nothing to stop e-mailsolicitations that pester employees with commercial and sexualoffers inappropriate for the workplace. And if it can get anyworse, such e-mail often houses viruses that can cripplesystems.

“We were getting literally millions of e-mail messages pointedto our domain,” says John White, vice president of IT at CentralInsurance Companies, a regional personal and commercial linescarrier. “We get millions of those from spammers. It's a bandwidthissue and a storage issue. We needed something to filter out allthe garbage.”

Central turned to Gateway Defender to deal with the issue. “Wehad been trying to manage this internally, but Gateway Defender hada solution that fit our needs perfectly,” says White. Centralresearched other services, but White found them to be moreexpensive and not as hands-on in dealing with customers. “We havevery good access to these folks because they are hungry and theyare small,” he asserts. “You don't go through a lot of layers oftechnical folks to get some information.”

What White likes about Gateway Defender is the service is on afront end Central can work with but doesn't have to maintain.“We're not dedicating ser-vers or resources or anything in here,”he explains. “It's all external, and [e-mail] is filtered on[Gateway's] servers.”

Gateway Defender offers the capability of opening or closing themailbox as much as the customer wants. “If there are specificsenders out there whom we know we are getting bombed with, we justcan close off anything from them,” says White. “Or we can say [toGateway] here is something that isn't passing the filter for somereason, and it's a business partner of ours. We can open the door[for those messages] because we know they are a legitimatesource.”

Central provides Gateway with all its valid e-mail addresses.From there, certain filters can be adjusted. “[Gateway] is going tostart with a base set of filters. An example would be adultmaterial,” says White. “Gateway is going to screen the header andsome of the content looking for keywords. If something related toadult material comes in, [the system] is going to stop that even if[the message] has a [valid] address. It does the same thing withquestionable language. If there are any executables that could bedangerous, those are going to be blocked.”

Dealing with spammers is like a game, comments White, with eachside trying to stay ahead of the other. “Let's say we have somefilters in place, and they are working on 98 percent [of thee-mail],” he says. “In two months, they might be working at 80percent because the spammers are figuring out how to beat thefilters.” When inappropriate material makes it through the filters,he adds, it is returned to a Gateway Defender e-mail account wherethe company will examine the message and determine how to beef upthe filters to stop similar messages.

Some messages get stopped on the Gateway servers and residethere. “We have a process where we review those to make sure thereis nothing out there that should come through,” says White. “Thenature of the beast is something gets blocked that should have beenallowed through. If one of our employees comes to us [with thisproblem], we can go to the Gateway Web site, scan our list ofe-mail, and see whether there is something that got blocked. Ourtech systems people can release [the e-mail]. It happens rarely. Ifyou have any type of decent filtering in place, you're not going toget away from that. If there is any downside, it is the smallpercent that potentially gets blocked that shouldn't getblocked–less than one percent. What's important is we have amechanism in place where we can go and check that.”

In the first six months of 2005 Gateway Defender blocked morethan 4,000 e-mail messages sent to Central that contained viruses.“We have our own virus protection for what does get through, but wewant [Gateway] on the perimeter to block as much as it possiblycan,” concludes White.