Newsletter Article 1

I had to write a series of articles for our company newsletter and I thought I'd post them here. I'm really not trying to be vain... Filtering the SPAM By Karl Wenger Dir. Network Services The Network Services group is responsible for the company-wide Information Technology infrastructure including the telecommunications and data networks, computers, servers, planning, troubleshooting, backup, administration, security, support and compliance. It can be really tough to talk about network and computer related items without putting everyone to sleep but I’ll do my best to keep it interesting! The Network Services group performs network and server maintenance every Thursday night starting at 9:00 p.m. and going through 6:00 a.m. MT Friday morning. We also perform critical updates to the servers on the second Tuesday of each month during those same hours. You may find that the systems may be offline during these times. Okay, I know that was pretty dry and boring… One area that I am often asked about is email SPAM. The normal question is “why am I receiving SPAM email in my mailbox. I thought we had stuff in place to block it?” This is a very good question. SPAM, or junk email, has increased exponentially over the last few years and the amount we receive as a company is absolutely staggering. Unfortunately, no single technique is a complete solution to the SPAM problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email vs. not rejecting all SPAM, and the associated costs in time and effort. The battle between spammers and anti-spam companies is similar to an arms race, with the spammers finding new ways around the systems and the anti-spam groups trying to keep pace. At Extra Space we have a complex system of servers and software solutions in place and we regularly tweak them to try to achieve the best SPAM elimination with the smallest amount of false positives. Even with all of our systems, most people in the company will still receive a few SPAM messages a day. I thought I’d include some email statistics in the newsletter and list exactly how much email we receive from outside of the company and how much of it is SPAM. (Note: these numbers DO NOT include internal emails.) For the month of May 2008 Total number of messages received: 7,373,102 Total number of received messages that were SPAM: 7,168,673 97.22% of received emails were SPAM. This is a rate of about 2.8 messages per second, 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. As you can see by these numbers, we do receive a lot of SPAM and we are filtering a lot of it. 97.22%... and that’s no baloney