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PROTECTING EXCHANGE
ENVIRONMENTS FROM SPAM
Abstract
"Two years from now, spam will be solved." So Bill Gates confidently informed members of the World Economic Forum in 2004. Unfortunately, he was wrong - spam has become a global pandemic that will cost businesses $100 billion in 2007. Spam's constantly evolving and mutating nature makes it extremely difficult to separate the good e-mail from the bad. This means that solutions which rely on static detection methods often fail to block an unacceptably high percentage of junk e-mails - or misidentify and incorrectly block an unacceptably high percentage of non-spam e-mails. Like other mail servers, Microsoft Exchange Server, today's dominant corporate e-mail platform, includes mechanisms to combat spam, but even these are not completely effective and must be supplemented with a third party solution if a business is to be able to eradicate spam from its network. This paper will discuss the shortcomings of some established filtering methods and outline how SPAMfighter's community-based approach to filtering can result in it performing much better than competing products and delivering a far superior return on investment. SPAMfighter Nattergalevej 6, 2 2400 Copenhagen NV Denmark
Contents
Introduction 3 Why businesses need to stop spam 3 Why some methods of filtering are not effective 5 Why your business should not rely on Exchange Server's spam filters 6 SPAMfighter: maximum protection for your Exchange environment 7 Other versions of SPAMfighter 8 About SPAMfighter 8 References 9 Introduction
In 2003, spam cost businesses $10 billion. By 2005, the cost had risen to $50 billion. In 2007, Ferris Research estimates that spam will cost business $100 billion. Why is spam costing businesses so much more than in previous years? Simply because there's so much more spam than in previous years. In 2001, about 10% of the e-mails sent were spam. Today, more than 50% of the 50 billion e-mails sent each day are spam. Spam is no longer simply a minor annoyance - it's become a major problem which costs businesses almost $2 billion per week. And the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Government and industry efforts to find a solution to the problem have had next to no impact - the spammers simply keep on spamming. Protecting e-mail systems from the exponentially increasing volume of spam has become a job which is ever more important. E-mail has become a mission critical communication channel to a constantly escalating number of businesses. In 2005, there were about 675 million business e-mail users, but it's predicted that that number will have increased to about 935 million by 2010 - and most of those users rely on e-mail each and every day to send and receive vital business-related communications. E-mail is not a luxury, it's a business necessity and any interruption to service can be both extremely inconvenient and extremely costly. While protecting e-mail systems has become increasingly important, it's also become increasingly difficult. Spammers need their e-mails to reach people and so are constantly looking for new ways to get their messages past spam filters and onto desktops. Unfortunately, some filtering methods are simply not sufficiently adaptive to be able to cope with spam's constantly evolving form and so fail to block an unacceptably high percentage of junk e-mail. And what's the point in a spam filter that doesn't block spam? Most modern mail servers include mechanisms to block and filter spam. Exchange Server, with approximately 100 million seats, is the most widely used mail server today and deploys a variety of techniques to stop spam from reaching end user desktops. But, because it's the most widely used server, it's also the server which spammers focus most on attempting to beat: if they manage to get their spam past Exchange's filters, they'll be able to get it onto 100 million desktops. And, for reasons that will be outlined later in this document, spammers are often able to do just that. Therefore, businesses that wish to block a high percentage of spam cannot simply rely on their mail server's built-in filters. This paper will explain why businesses need to block spam, why some methods of filtering do not work and how SPAMfighter's community-based approach to filtering enables it to detect spam more accurately and deliver a m... [download for more]
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