Re: [ASRG] 0 - General, Reliability of Transport

["Chris Lewis" <clewis at nortelnetworks.com>]

Chris wrote:


> spend some time on webmaster forums and discuss the use of filters with
> them. you will find many (the ones that care about customer service) 
> disable
> them for this reason.

Perhaps you don't know...

I run the inbound spam/virus filters for a corporation with 60,000 
employees that has revenues in the billions. The Internet is our 
business, and some of those emails can be worth an enormous amount when 
you consider some of our contracts are worth 100's of millions.

The consequences of not filtering, however, can be quite costly too. 
$100-200K/day of lost productivity alone, having to double internal 
infrastructure, leaving us wide open to viruses, etc.

Indeed, _not_ filtering leaves us at risk of being sued under workplace 
harrassment legislation, and has severe employee satisfaction impact. Or 
having our entire email infrastructure crashing down around our heads.[*]

Were we nervous about filtering? You betcha.  It took over a year to 
production deploy filters because of all of the compensating controls we 
implemented - every filtered email results in an inline rejection (so 
legitimate senders know they've been blocked and how to get it fixed, 
but forged senders don't get hit), quarantine/recipient notification.  A 
well developed false-positive handling system.

To filter/not filter is more than a simple yes/no question.  It's what 
you wrap around it that makes the difference.

> But when it comes to the decision makers you will find that the attitude is
> different.

The decision makers here are the most strident in insisting that we filter.

[*] Melissa hit three months before we were scheduled to deploy 
filtering.  Melissa came close to taking us down, averted at the last 
minute by a frantic over-the-weekend deployment of the filters 3 months 
early. The filters have saved our butts many times since.

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg