I wish to take care of myself and as the sysadmin, I have a duty to protect my users from a deluge of spam.

My being inconvenienced by the small amount of spam making it into my inbox or that of my users is actually a a small problem compared to what would happen if I opened the firewall and switched off the mail filters.

We currently refuse to accept the connections of 950,000 mail attempts per month. Of the 500,000 mail connections accepted, around 200,000 of those are rejected before they get into sending us the content bit of the message. After that we refuse to accept 100,000 emails after their data phase is complete. The second stage servers do some more filtering and will usually cull out another 50,000 messages a month.

If it wasn't for spam, I'd have around 8 hours more time for projects per week, 4 less servers to look after and an easier life. I'd estimate we could probably drop our bandwidth by 20% and save a few quid. In all the cost of spam to my company is approaching 30% of my salary. If I let the users rely on client side filters, email would effectively be a dead system of no use tot he company.

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/287/29779#29779