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

[Kenneth Porter]

I didn't see this cross the MIMEDefang list so I'm forwarding it from the 
Dovecot list:

------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:14 PM -0700
From: Esther Schindler <esther at bitranch.com>
To: dovecot at dovecot.org
Subject: [Dovecot] help a journalist: What do you wish the CIO understood 
	about fighting spam?

Hi, folks. I'm senior online editor at CIO.com, and I'm working on an
article for which I'd very much like your help.

There's often a lack of communication between techies and top company
management. Maybe they don't want to hear about problems; perhaps you  give
them technical details that are far more granular than they want  to know.
But dealing with spam is a topic that every e-mail admin has  to cope with
-- and I'm not sure that the CIO knows the real issues.

I have the ear of the boss, however. Essentially, I'm trying to put
together the collected wisdom of e-mail and network admins in a  fashion
that CIOs will understand. Or at least one teeny corner of it.

So I have a very simple question to pose to you:

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

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

Feel free to share anecdotes, horror stories, even success stories.  While
I hope that every CIO will read this article, I also hope that  it becomes
the document you bring to a new manager ("Here: this is  what's important
to me").

I'm sure there are plenty of other things that you wish your CIO  grokked,
whether about e-mail administration or other topics (not the  least of
which is "the e-mail admin is underpaid"). But I do have to  limit myself
somehow, and "what's important about fighting spam" has  a lot of leeway.

I'll be sure to stop by here (as I expect others want to participate  in
the conversation), but feel free to cc me with your response or  send me a
private message.

I'm hoping for a rather fast turnaround on this article, so please  blurt
out your first thoughts rather than plan on writing a nice,  leisurely
response. If all goes well, I'd like to get this article  posted in the
next couple of weeks.

Please be sure to let me know how to refer to you in the article; the
usual format is &name, &title, &company and &location ("Esther  Schindler
is a senior developer at the Groovy Corporation in  Scottsdale Arizona").
If you give me some kind of context I'm willing  to work without one. That
is, I do need some identifying  characteristics to give the article
credibility ("Esther works at a  large finance company in the Southwest").

Esther Schindler
senior online editor, CIO.com
http://blogs.cio.com/blog/37

---------- End Forwarded Message ----------

------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:22 AM -0700
From: Esther Schindler <esther at bitranch.com>
To: Kenneth Porter <shiva at sewingwitch.com>
Cc: dovecot at dovecot.org
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] help a journalist: What do you wish the CIO 
	understood	about fighting spam?

It's MOSTLY written and sitting on my hard drive. I was  breathtakingly
thrilled to get a lot of good input from all sorts of  email admins (I have
30 pages of notes). But then I went out of town  for a week, came  back,
and am setting up to leave for ANOTHER week  out of town. So much for my
grand plans.

Let's see if I can get this article finished while I'm on the road. I  sure
do want to see it posted.

--Esther
   (who yes, is still listening)

---------- End Forwarded Message ----------