5. AAARRRGGGHHH! Spam, Spam, Spam...Damn, Damn, Damn

I love email. Unlike phones and most instant messaging, it's communications with a more or less permanent record; something akin to mail written with pencil and paper. Email is still the killer app that attracts most people to computers and phones. As with most of my other year in review stories, email has its high and low points.

I've written 5 versions of a long and winding book about Microsoft's Exchange email server, Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server, first for Sybex and now for Wiley and Sons. I spent ten years installing and implementing Exchange in a number enterprise and small business environments and I still consult occasionally on the product and email in general. I know email inside and out and outside and in and I've come to the conclusion that there is no way short of banning email to deal with the deadly curse of spam.

Sure you can use a spam catching app at the server or a workstation to keep the stuff out of your precious inbox and in most instances inboxes are pretty clean now. But because there are so many kinds of spam and because legitimate email can show up where you dump spam, managing the stuff is a royal pain in the neck.

Eat Spam! courtesy Hormel Foods Corporation

I run my own Exchange server and I use GFI's MailEssentials on the server to catch and deal with spam. You can choose to delete spam as it's discovered. But most users don't like simple deletion precisely because good mail can wind up being labeled as spam. So, you can put a tag at the beginning of each spam mail's subject line and send it to the inbox. Users hate this because it's a pain to deal with lots of bad email messages while also trying to read their good mail. Yes, they can sort by subject and group all the alleged spam mail together, but if they're "popular" with spammers, they can be faced with hundreds, even thousands of spam messages a day. If they don't clean up the spam, it grows day after day to major proportions and all in the very visible inbox.

MailEssentials can also put each user's spam in a set of spam folders. That at least separates spam from inbox mail, but most users aren't all that committed to cleaning out their spam folders. So, the folders are ignored and the mail grows and, as one of my clients recently noted, "There's only 85 megabytes on our email server. Where did all that space [500 GB] go?

So, now we've implemented a regular email aging regime for spam folders. If an email in the spam folders is older than 30 days, it's deleted. That's a nice solution. Yea, if you believe that, I've got this bridge in New York you might want to buy. People still ignore their spam, but now they ask the mail administrators where a legitimate message that must have gone into their spam folders [over 30 days ago] might be. Sure we can recover the lost file, but what a pain. In many organizations today, it seems like there are enough spam managers to staff a Wal-Mart.

Spam has become a crummy way of life for all of us, users and administrators alike. Well I take that back. My wife never gets spam and you can bet I'm not going to give out her address here. She's on my Exchange server. Don't ask me what I'd do with a spammer if I ever found one. You don't want to know.