Fighting spam in a corporate environment using open-source solutions - a case study.
Pieter Blaauw · 2005
The problem of spam is one that many organizations face today, and there are virtually no e-mail users that have not suffered from receiving unsolicited e-mail. Simply put, spam is symptomatic of an inefficient and parasitic business; one that cannot bear the cost of its own activities, and thus moves the cost of its activities on to others. More importantly, the cost of filtering spam is totally disproportionate to the benefit of the spammer. E-mail users at Pick 'n Pay suffered from this same problem, with some cases being as high as half of all e-mail being spam. This paper discusses the path followed by Pick 'n Pay Information Systems in finding a solution to this ever growing problem. Pick 'n Pay looked at several solutions in order to find the most cost effective way of filtering spam for the users. The most cost effective solution was the implementation of an open-source spam filter, based on a high availability solution designed for future scalability. The solution provided us with the ability to filter e-mail at the ISP, thus saving expensive bandwidth, yet allowing users to administrate their own quarantine boxes and providing them with the ability to update the software to create better accuracy with regards to spam filtering. The solution proved that open-source