Detection system It's a familiar story to e-mail users worldwide.
takes bite out of
DOE, HECO spam
The new product, which blocks
90 percent of junk e-mail,
has saved time and moneyBy Lyn Danninger
ldanninger@starbulletin.comOn any day, there could be an urgent request from Mr. Ioko Mbeki, son of the former president of Democratic Republic of the Congo, who requires immediate help in a secret financial transaction involving the transfer of millions of dollars to your personal bank account.
Just about every day it consists of solicitations for everything from fixing bad credit to insurance, mortgages, loans and Viagra.
At first, spam was considered an annoying but sometimes amusing sidebar to the work day. Computer viruses entering the system were the big worry and grabbed most of the headlines.
But now weighed down by the weight of spam, companies large and small are looking for better solutions to solve the problem.
It wasn't too long ago that the state Department of Education could expect that at least half of the daily e-mail it received would be unwanted junk.
"We were getting about 15,000 or 16,000 e-mails daily. Out of that, at least 8,000 were spam," said Jeff Hara, technology specialist at the DOE.
It was a similar situation over at Hawaiian Electric Co., said HECO's information technology director, Chuck Wall. About 40 percent of the daily e-mail received by the company's 1,700 e-mail addresses was spam, he said.
While it's difficult to calculate how much deleting non-business e-mail costs U.S. businesses in productivity, those familiar with the situation say it translates to a lot of money.
Clifton Royston, systems architect with local Internet service provider LavaNet said a 2001 national study estimated the average person spent 2.2 hours a month deleting e-mail.
"They then estimated that by 2003, it would have climbed to 15 hours a month spent deleting unwanted e-mail," he said.
Even the European Union weighed in on the ubiquitous problem.
"In February 2001, the European Commission estimated that unsolicited commercial e-mails cost businesses worldwide $9.4 billion in connection costs, discounting the human costs," Royston said.
At first, companies began to address the problem internally, by putting in their own filters. But the problem was how high to set the filters, said HECO's Wall.
"It's a very hard problem to solve. We started getting to the point where we were putting filters into machines, setting it up and trying to figure how to set it. If it's too high, you may miss a message," he said.
Wall estimates the serious build-up of spam began two to three years ago.
For the DOE's Hara, while there had been a slow build-up, things really got bad after Sept. 11.
"It was increasing and we were getting more and more complaints from our users. I guess the post office scanning more mail made it more difficult, so more direct marketers and junk mailers turned to e-mail," he said.
Both men chose a solution that is growing in popularity, an offsite automated spam detection system.
For HECO and the DOE, the choice was a product created in 1999 by California-based Big Fish Communications. This year, the company partnered with Sprint to market the product.
The system works outside a client's network and uses a spam scoring system that claims to block at least 90 percent of the spam but minimizes the amount of e-mail mistakenly classed as spam. It also includes virus scanning and can identify and kill viruses before they enter the corporate network.
No software is installed on the company network, said Big Fish co-founder Dave Cohen.
"We are positioned at a different locale. The customer just points their mail to our technology centers," he said.
So far there are seven of the centers, in places such as California, Hong Kong and London. The messages get scanned at the center closest to the customer, Cohen said.
There are other products on the market designed to do similar things, such as products by BrightMail and Postini, Cohen said.
There is software that is installed on location, such as BrightMail's product. Postini's spam detection system uses a central data center in California where mail is sent to be filtered.
So far both HECO and the DOE are happy with the results.
"For us it's almost a 50 percent savings and now all the spam is not stored on our servers," said the DOE's Hara.
Results were similar for HECO, which has been using the system for about two months.
Because the spam is stored elsewhere, the company has the ability to go back in and check the spam periodically for any legitimate messages that may have inadvertently been filtered out, HECO's Wall said.
So far there have been no false positives," he said.
"It also gives us the ability to go back to the 'shark tank' just to see," Wall said. "I've never missed a legitimate e-mail so they are doing a good job."
Costs for the product can depend on the size of the company and its usage, said Bryan Ito, Data Solutions Manager for Sprint Hawaii. For a large customer such as the DOE, price is based on the total amount of e-mail scanned for viruses and spam.
"That works out about 39 cents per megabyte. For the DOE, it ends up being less than 1 cent per month," he said.
Over at LavaNet, the company is developing its second generation of a spam filtering system along similar lines.
The increase in spam has reached an estimated 30 percent of its e-mail traffic.
"We are in the process of doing a major upgrade and overhaul of the mail system just because so much of the volume we are handling is now spam," he said.
In one random 24-hour period, Royston said, the company measured and found that 90 percent of the spam coming to one of its servers came from addresses they already had identified and blocked from the system.
Jeff Bloom, president of the Computer Training Academy, said that while the new automated spam filtering systems and the many new anti-spam products on the market are a big improvement, none are perfect yet.
"I was getting over 100 (spam) a day. Now I'm down to 10 or 15," he said. "The silver bullet doesn't exist yet."
Bloom would also like to see Congress take action on spam, much as it did in 1991 with the federal consumer Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibited prerecorded telemarketing calls and junk faxes. A broad anti-spam law banning unsolicited commercial messaging was approved by the European Parliament in May this year.