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Email's critical importance for businesses small and large cannot be overstated, and everyone understands how spam undermines its utility. If you do nothing, your mailbox is filled with objectionable content whose volume increases all the time. Maybe you've taken some action, yet spammers are inventive creatures, finding new forms of attack. (Who buys from these people?) The vital question is how should a business choose an anti-spam solution to address this tax on productivity?
This article is from our Service Insights Newsletter.
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It's a good bet that most organizations, large and small, have some form of anti-spam solution in place. Small businesses typically get theirs handed to them as free software from a PC vendor, or an imposed solution by their Internet Service Provider (ISP). In either case the business owner must train people to be spam fighters while trying to ensure the system doesn't lose email from legitimate sources. Losing even one legitimate email can be disastrous, particularly for a small business where every customer is critical.
Larger organizations aren't in a much better position. They may have purchased a commercial anti-spam firewall or have built up a homebrew solution using one of the many open source solutions. But they still have the same problem of teaching users to work with less-than-friendly user interfaces, and users need to spend more time than they should fighting spam instead of performing productive work.
Given the impact on productivity, the need for some anti-spam solution is obvious. The choice of a solution for should be made cognizant of three major criteria: cost, performance, and organizational fit with a company's culture or style.
Cost is an obvious criterion for any business decision, but many of the cost components of an anti-spam solution can be hidden or hard to quantify. Anti-spam systems are not something you buy, set up, and forget, so acquisition costs are a minor piece of the total cost equation. These systems encure installation and, set-up cost, which will vary based on the type of solution discussed below.
Employees also must be trained in the use of the system as well. This training task can be simple or complex depending on the anti-spam solution's user interface and may require lots of tweaking or adjustments by employees, either centrally or individually, to adapt to the changing profile of spam. Thus, the simplicity and usability of the user interface will affect this employee training cost.
Not only must employees be trained, but, most importantly, the anti-spam system must be trained. Anti-spam systems require daily maintenance to train the system to distinguish valid mail from spam. This is done by examining the system's categorization errors. It's an on-going process since spammers frequently change their forms of attack. This ongoing maintenance contributes to employees' workload and distracts them from their real work of delivering value to customers. A good anti-spam solution will not distract employees from their real work of delivering value to customers and have far less impact on users' workload than the default system of deleting spam from inboxes.
If an organization wants to change its anti-spam approach, then the removal cost of a system comes into play. The anti-spam solution should also be one that can be removed easily with simple restoration to a prior state in case you opt for a different path.
Beyond cost criteria, a good anti-spam solution will have strong performance in classifying email. Ideally no spam should get through (no false negatives) and, more importantly, no real emails should get deleted (no false positives). Typically most organizations bias towards minimizing false positives. The usability of the user interface could also be considered an element of the system's performance.
Anti-spam systems take two forms: centrally or individually managed. The choice will be guided strongly by its fit with an organization's culture or style. Individually managed systems, usually in the form of a plug-in to an email client or an external package of an antivirus system, require every user to do their own training and configuring. For a centrally managed system, in the form of an external system or a package on the mail server, typically a small group performs the training and configuration. A good metric for how much attention an anti-spam system should take is about two minutes per day for an individually managed system, and about 5-10 minutes per day for 100 users on a centrally managed system.
Individually managed systems are best for organizations with highly self-directed work forces and a strong sense of ownership. Centrally managed systems are best for organizations where it is important to reduce the distractions for the workforce and have a uniform standard for the definition of spam. If your organization is not very IT-savvy, it may be best to outsource the anti-spam service. The vendor does not have to be your ISP; there are good spam filtering services on the market to choose from. If you are a more IT-savvy organization with your own mail server in-house, consider using an anti-spam appliance instead of server-resident tools in order to minimize load on your mail server and to give you a greater range of choice. In either case, you need enough control over the anti-spam service so that you change settings to reflect your corporate needs and minimize lost email from customers.
In summary, the selection and evaluation of a business' anti-spam system should consider the following questions .
Does your organization have a bias towards either central or individual administration of the anti-spam solution?Does the system fit your email infrastructure?Do you have enough central staff to implement the solution and handle the new workload?If you have minimal central staff, is the system simple enough to keep your employees stay focused on their real work? What is your tolerance for errors - i.e., for losing legitimate mail?Is the anti-spam solution intrusive or hard to remove from your mail environment?Not all spam solutions are created equal. All of them have strengths and weaknesses. The trick is finding a system with strong performance, shortcomings you can live with, and with a simplicity of use that spam handling becomes a minor nuisance rather than an excuse for non-productivity. .
-- Fred Van Bennekom, Dr.B.A., Principal Great Brook Consulting
-- Eric Johansson, Internet Guide Service
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