A new musical opened on Broadway recently: Spamalot.
No, it's not the story of the e-mail plague that continues to bedevil IT managers; it's a musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film about the search for the holy artifact, knights, maidens, shrubbery, and a vicious rabbit with a mean streak a "mile
wide."
Between this musical and spam's association with e-mail, I wondered if today's theater patron realizes Spam is the name of
a spiced meat product developed in Austin, Minn., in 1937 and apparently popular during World War II.
Either way, a year ago Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act. Not bad for a name as far as government humor goes, but it's not
Monty Python funny.
The act can hardly be said to have been a rousing success. According to some recent data collected by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project, e-mail users say they are being hit with more spam than ever before, but it doesn't bother them as
much as it once did. Many people said the same thing about Paris Hilton, so that too is hardly a rousing success.
There are different counts of how much e-mail passing around the Internet is spam. E-mail vendors such as Postini say it is
82 percent, whereas Symantec puts the figure at 68 percent. That is a rousing success, but only for spam vendors.
I recently spoke to William Gardner, director of IT architecture, standards, and security at Ryder Systems, a global provider
of transportation, warehouse, and supply-chain management. Gardner gave me a bird's-eye view of the spam problem. Unlike many
Americans, he remains bothered by the amount of spam his company receives.
"It didn't really seem to be a problem until mid-2003, and then it just exploded," Gardner told me. He said the company receives
about 50,000 e-mails a day, and he estimates that 70 percent of those are spam.
Ryder is a Lotus Notes user, and Notes has some basic capabilities to filter e-mail and undesirable mail domains, but when
the spam problem ramped up in 2003, the problem began to impact productivity.
Gardner said he looked at a variety of solutions to deal with the problem. One was not very expensive, but it required a great
deal of management effort. "We just found it took too much time when we had other projects we needed to work on," he explained.
Ryder ended up installing an IronPort C-60 e-mail security appliance, insulating its four Lotus Notes servers from direct
connection with the Internet while protecting users from viruses and spam. The system was deployed at the network gateway,
shielding the internal servers from e-mail threats without interfering with message system operations or adding additional
administration time, Gardner said.
Gardner's biggest issue was paying for the system because it was difficult to justify the cost. "It's a cost item. There's
no way to show a return on investment. So it's difficult to point to the benefits to receive funding," he said.
My first response would be to leave the finance department's e-mail unfiltered for a few days and then watch how quickly they
fund the project, but maybe that's just me.
Instead, Gardner was able to convince the powers that be that an e-mail filtering appliance would be a worthy investment.
"We've had it in production for four months now, and we have significantly reduced our spam. And if it says there is a virus
in an e-mail, it's there. It's saved us a lot of grief," Gardner said.
There are other companies fighting spam as well. Blue Security is a little circumspect on its method, but company officials say they are working on a way to diminish spam and spyware for
both consumers and enterprises based on a Do Not Disturb registry. It will launch its public beta service later this year.
Who knows? Maybe when our children go see the revival of Spamalot, they will think first of canned meat and bunnies with a mile-wide vicious streak -- and not of annoying e-mail.
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