[Mimedefang] help a journalist: What do you wish the CIO understood about fighting spam? (fwd)

[Anne Bennett]

Esther Schindler <esther at bitranch.com> asks:

> ***If you could get your CIO (or top management) to understand one  thing,
> just ONE thing, about fighting spam, what would it be?***

It's a moving target.

> And the follow-up: why did you pick that one item?

Because top management (not my current, thank goodness, but former bosses)
seem to think there's a silver bullet for everything, something you
can buy, set, and forget.  It doesn't work that way: it's an arms race
with lowlifes who have a *lot* of time to devote to studying our
spam-fighting tactics and working around them.

There are some great packages out there with some adaptability built
in (e.g. SpamAssassin with cron-automated rule updates and the use of
a selection of RBLs), but unless you outsource the whole thing, you
need someone to spend time tweaking and improving regularly, or what
worked really well this month will work only so-so next month, and not
at all a year down the road - or else what performed just fine last
month will be crawling on its knees this month because of the traffic
increase.

"Anne Bennett is a senior system administrator in the Faculty of
Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University in Montreal,
Canada."


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Sysadmin, ENCS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne at encs.concordia.ca                                    +1 514 848-2424 x2285