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Contents 
Introduction
The pros and cons
Evading the spamsters
A final note of caution |
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Outsourcing can reduce the additional costs associated with recieving and dealing with bandwidth-hogging, unnecessary spam e-mails. Spam has become such a problem that those organisations taking a proactive approach (such as using spam filtering technology) are not completely eradicating the unwanted e-mails. What is worse, the organisation is still paying for the bandwidth that comes with recieving the spam. Another advantage to the outsourcing model is having this cost passed on to the provider.
Using an outsourcing partner, staff can expect a lot less smut, a lot less offers for Viagra, and fewer e-mails asking if you need anything extended. While it might not completely eradicate the problem, it can potentially prevent the majority of spam from landing on your doorstep.
"One of our users did their own analysis on cost. They had an anti-virus, as well as anti-spam solution for 7000 users and it was costing them close to AU$5 million. Around 70 percent of their e-mails were spam," says Mike Bosch, managing director of e-mail security vendor Ironport Systems. "The newer systems have reduced administration and infrastructure costs. We can take six to nine servers and replace them with just one box, and cut down their ownership costs by around 75 percent.
"When it comes to small and medium businesses [using outsourcing], the main aspect they will save is time -- and in this day and age that is one of the most important commodities of any business." One technique used by Ironport is preventative filtering. This method takes a look at any e-mail sender's IP address and cross-references it with a database, which has both a black and white list of senders.
"Someone you know who is a good sender will be put on the whitelist. The system doesn't even check it," says Bosch.
One of Ironport's customers, Dell Computer, used to recieve 26 million messages a day -- only 1.5 million of which were legitimate, Bosch says.
"They had 68 gateways running Spam Assassin -- but spam was still seeping through. We consolidated 68 down to eight boxes and thanks to our reputation filters managed to block 19 million messages. We didn't even open a connection to any of them, they were just blocked from even coming into the system. A further 5.5 million were scanned with Brightmail and blocked until [Dell] were left with their real mail."
Richard Moran, infrastructure manager at Australian services giant Theiss, says now that the company has started outsourcing its e-mail management system to e-mail outsourcing firm MessageLabs, he could never imagine going back to having an in-house system.
"Within days we were noticing a substantial drop in the number of spam e-mails we were receiving -- saving us a fortune in bandwidth usage," says Moran.
"Anybody can drop onto the system and have a look to see if anything was captured and download anything that was relevant. But the system learns quickly and soon we were receiving mainly work e-mails. The other part of the system is the virus scanning aspect which as worked spectacularly. Our virus infection via e-mail is now virtually nil. I don't think we have had any virus by e-mail since installing the system. The savings involved there are astronomical.
"Savings of at least 20 percent on download traffic, as well as the time saved. Staff no longer have to wade through e-mails that aren't of use -- that alone is worth the cost."
The journalism in this article is pathetic.
Just a monkey cut and pasting facts and references with very little analysis.
ZDNET needs to pay more obviously.