Strencom

Strencom Advanced Linux Solutions have released 2 SPAM Filtering services for the business market.

At this stage, almost everyone with an email address has received spam or junk-mail. In a recent report released by email management company MessageLabs, they found that SPAM makes up almost half of all email. MessageLabs has calculated that a firm employing 500 people is losing over €4,800 per month in lost productivity through dealing with unsolicited email, if it has no anti-Spam measures in place, and this figure does not include the additional cost of the bandwidth that SPAM takes up. “One extreme case that we came across recently was a small company with a long established e-commerce website, who were receiving over 2000 emails per day, of which over 90% were SPAM” said Tim Murphy, Director of Strencom ALS. “This was an extreme case, but based on the amount of time that their employees were spending on email, they were losing productivity on each and every SPAM mail, and they can't just delete them all, as the balance of the 10% were usually orders. After implementing our managed spam solution, those figures totally reversed to where less than 2% of the emails received were SPAM. The company believed that they saved over 2 hours a day deleting spam”.

SPAM also increases the chances of receiving a virus through an infected email, and this can cost a company more lost productivity and time in cleaning up the Local Area Network, after the infection, as it is estimated that 1 in every 220 spam emails contained a virus (http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9360010).

At best, spam for your company is just annoying, and at worst it is something that comes up day after day as a major problem. There are a number of ways to combat SPAM, however, any single one alone will not be enough. To start, a company should formulate a spam policy. A company should firstly inform all its employees, and especially its sales and marketing departments that sending spam is not permitted as a way to promote the company products. An employee should never respond to spam, even if its to unsubscribe from the list, as these offers to follow a link to unsubscribe trick the receiver and really only confirms to the sender that your email address actually exists. The IT Department should ensure that their mailservers are not open relays, and cannot be accessed from the outside to send spam. Subscribe to a mailing blacklist which lists mailservers that send spam, although many industry analysts have differing views on this method. And of course, using specialist software to detect and delete spam is probably the most effective. The SANS Institute is one of the foremost authorities on Internet and Computer Security, and is a good reference site for any IT or non-IT person in charge of the LAN. It gives a more detailed spam policy on its site. (http://www.sans.org)

“It is a generally held belief that most of the worlds SPAM is sent by a small number of individuals, but I have received spam from Irish companies in the recent past. Companies that I have never heard of, who have legitimate businesses in Ireland, and who don't seem to know that its not very good net-iquette to send these emails. On the 3 occasions that I did get it from Irish companies, I reported it to spamcop (http://spamcop.net), a central reporting database, and also phoned the company's responsible. Of course, that's not always feasible, or possible to do, as you would spend your working day making phone calls.” commented Murphy.

Strencom ALS, who were the 1^st Red Hat Linux Advanced Server Reseller appointed in Ireland are combining their expertise in Linux with their ISP experience in mail systems to provide this product, both to their existing customers, and any other companies that want to address their SPAM problem.

There are 2 product offerings available. The first is a fully managed service provided by Strencom ALS. This means that all email for a company is sent through the Strencom Filter first. Once the filter identifies it as SPAM, the mail will be quarantined or deleted, and the genuine emails are forwarded as normal to the company mailserver. The advantage of this service is that the company does not have to change anything on their site. There is no need to change from their exiting ISP, there is no hardware or software required, it will work on any brand mailserver, and there is no costly re-configuration of mailservers or firewalls, and it is 100% managed by Strencom. It also allows for a white list, which is a list of trusted known email addresses that can be added, so they are not scanned. This service is especially good for SME's as they do not have to outlay large sums of money on buying the software, and annual maintenance on the network, but can be implemented by any size company. “We believe that this is the first Dedicated Managed SPAM Service available in Ireland, and its not just available to our existing ISP customers.”

The 2^nd product is for organisations that want to manage their own system in house. It is based on the same system as the managed service, except all the hardware, and software is located in the customer's site. As the product is based on Linux Open Source Software, and the RedHat Operating System, it is combining Open Source Software, and SPAM Filtering Software to solve a real problem. “As this is a totally stand alone system from all other applications, we see this as an easy way for a company to introduce itself to Open Source Software, and try it out for themselves, without changing any mission critical applications in the network” says Tim Murphy. “Once a company realises the potential, stability, security, and cost savings that can be gained from using Open Source Software, then they can make an informed decision on any future deployments of Open Source Software to run applications such as Oracle and SAP, as well as SAN's & NAS” commented Murphy. The Anti-SPAM product can also be integrated into a Web Monitoring System which gives details of employee usage, websites visited, data downloaded, and blocking of certain types of websites based on category. www.als.ie.