[Mimedefang] how much spam does the average large company get?

[Matt Cramer]

My management has asked me to make some graphs (blech) showing how good of
a job we do fighting spam.  I know what we do here - basically by
eliminating spams with large SpamAss scores, and doing much of the
sophisticated smtp filtering mimedefang allows, I've gotten our delivered
but flagged spam level down to about 20%.  Before I started, we were at
40%.  That is a good trend that I can show, but I am trying to get an idea
of what other companies see in terms of spam.  We are Fortune 500ish, with
about 7000 mail users.

I know the commercial spam fighting tools' marketing usually claims that
40-60% of a large company's mail is spam.  Is that accurate in others
experience?  Not that I don't trust marketing people, but they might have
a tendency to inflate that.  Our CEO doesn't tolerate bullshit numbers
when you present to him, so I'd feel better at defending my claim of
40-60% for others with maybe an impartial survey or even some anecdotes
from listmembers.  My research online found plenty of claims, but all of
it coming from research from anti-spam vendors.

Comments or suggestions welcome.


Matt

-- 
Matthew S. Cramer <mscramer at armstrong.com>          Office: 717-396-5032
Infrastructure Security Analyst                     Fax:    717-396-5590
Armstrong World Industries, Inc.                    Cell:   717-917-7099