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Perhaps no problem plagues the Internet as deeply as that of unsolicited junk e-mail, or spam. While there's no doubt that spam can be annoying to the end users, spam can cause problems for both the network administrators and for those who own or manage a company because spam robs your company of productivity and of system resources.

Spam and Backend Mail Systems

First, let's take a look at the system resource that are consumed by spam. Any time that an e-mail message is sent to someone in your organization, the message must first pass through your organization's Internet connection and through the firewall before reaching your Exchange Server. Regardless of how much bandwidth your organization may have, there is a finite amount of data that the Internet connection can handle in a given amount of time. This means that if your organization is using their Internet connection at or near its total capacity then any time you receive a junk e-mail message, other legitimate messages are kept waiting until bandwidth becomes available.

Once a message passes into your organization, it must pass through your firewall, which then hands the message off to the appropriate Exchange Server. Both the firewall and the Exchange server use CPU cycles and memory when processing the message, resources that would be better used elsewhere. Keep in mind that each e-mail message that your organization receives consumes a tiny amount of resources such as bandwidth, memory, CPU cycles, etc. Most organizations would never even notice the impact caused by receiving a few junk e-mail messages. The real problem is caused by the sheer volume of junk mail that pours into many organizations. Before I implemented spam protection in my own organization, I was receiving more junk messages than legitimate messages; upward of 200 junk messages a day.

When an organization is plagued by excessive spam, disk space on the Exchange Server also becomes an issue. To most people, the idea of storing spam is absurd. However, a recent IDC report estimates that 44 percent of users retain e-mail messages for a year or more. Even if your users aren't storing spam, Exchange is designed to retain deleted items for a period of time. Therefore, those spam messages that your users are deleting are still stored on the server for a period of time.

Spam and Employee Productivity

Spam not only impacts the backend information systems, it can lead to a loss of productivity as well. The most obvious way that productivity is impacted is that if users are busy deleting junk mail. If a user is constantly flooded with spam, there's a good chance that in the midst of deleting the spam, important messages may also be accidentally deleted. On more than one occasion I personally have accidentally deleted important messages from clients while cleaning out spam. This has sometimes resulted in a loss of income.

If your employees' jobs involve sending e-mail messages to clients or doing Internet-based research, their Internet access could be greatly slowed because the steady flow of inbound spam is consuming a large portion of the company's Internet bandwidth. As if that weren't enough, spam sometimes contains malicious scripts, viruses, etc.

I recently helped a friend who owns a trucking company deal with a spam problem. His organization was receiving so much spam that it was becoming difficult to even use e-mail. Each user was receiving dozens of messages every hour. The real problems started when the company received an outrageously expensive phone bill. One of the users had apparently opened a message containing a malicious script that caused the PC's modem to dial a 900 number. In the end, I was able to get rid of the dialer, but the spam problem had grown so far out of control that everyone in the company had to get a new e-mail address. Of course, that meant informing all of the clients of the new contact information. To make a long story short, this entire ordeal was a huge problem for this small company.

One of the more overlooked ways in which spam effects an organization's productivity is in the amount of time that users spend deleting it. A recent IDC white paper estimates that one in every five e-mail messages that a person receives is spam and that the average employee spends about five seconds getting rid of each spam message.

Personally, I think that the ratio of spam to legitimate messages is much higher than one in five. In an average day I get about 30 legitimate e-mails and well over 200 spam messages. Let's assume that IDC is correct, though, and that one out of every five messages that your employees receive are spam. Now, let's assume that the average employee gets 50 e-mail messages per day, 10 of which are spam. If IDC is correct in saying that it takes five seconds to look at and delete a spam on average, then an employee that receives 10 spams a day wastes 50 seconds dealing with spam.

At first, 50 seconds of wasted time sounds trivial. However, if an organization had 2,000 employees, then the employees would be collectively wasting 10,000 seconds or 27.7 man hours per day. This works out to 7,222.2 wasted man hours each year. If the average employee earned $15 per hour then the company would be looking at a financial loss of $108,333.33 per year in wasted man hours, just because each employee spent a mere 50 seconds a day dealing with spam.

Fighting Spam

So the real question now is how do you deal with spam? Several states have passed legislation making spam illegal, but I personally don't see the problem going away. Much of the spam is sent from foreign countries or from other states. This means that state level anti-spam legislation is unenforceable.

Microsoft has built mechanisms into Outlook that allow you to fight spam. The problem is that configuring Outlook to filter spam without using third-party software is a lot of work. (I have described the necessary procedures in the article found at http://www.brienposey.com/kb/filtering_spam.asp.) Additionally, spammers are always using new spamming techniques, so the Outlook filters that work today may not work tomorrow. Even if you could keep an Outlook level spam filter up to date, there's a huge administrative burden since each user's Outlook profile must be maintained independently. The only real solution is to stop spam at the Exchange Server level, before it can make its way into the user's mailboxes.

While no anti-spam product is 100 percent effective, there are several good products for fighting spam at the Exchange level. My three personal favorites include GFI MailEssentials, Ipop, and SurfControl. Each of these products does a reasonably good job filtering spam at the Exchange level, but each also has its strengths and weaknesses. Below are links to each of the three anti spam products that I have reviewed and a rating that I have given each:

• GFI MailEssentials -- 9 out of 10
• Surf Control -- 8 out of 10
• Ipop -- 6 out of 10