Introduction
The term spam is used to refer to the unwanted email messages that are passed over to the receiver through the internet. Such messages may be distasteful, deceitful or sent by error. The spam is not just targeted to specific individuals. In some instances, there can be guessing of the email addresses and the addresses may be obtained from which ever the source and the receiver may not have the knowledge about this. Any person can be a target of spam (Anon 1).
Summary of the case
Several companies do encounter this problem (of spam). For instance, the employees of the Pier 1 Chain Company were spending a lot of time clearing spam from their email boxes each day. The whole email system became a major problem at a time when spam formed a bigger proportion of the total number of email; about eighty percent (Case Study, Para 1).
More so, another company known as the Charter communications, which is the fourth largest television and internet cable company suffered from the spammers. The company handles more than 150 million email messages each day. The spam comprised of more than fifty percent of inbound email. This spam brought about a nuisance to the customers.
Another example comes from the First Banking Services Company. In this company, the employees use desktops to offer the main data processing services in the United States, specifically in the southeastern region. This company is linked with several partners and most of its email messages have large attachments. Here, spam has turned out to be a major problem.
Statement of the problem
The manager in any of the organizations where spam is a major issue is faced with several problems. For instance, due to spam coming on the increase, the employee productivity in the Pier 1 Company suffered greatly. In the effort for the company to overcome this problem, it used a key ward filter but this system did not succeed since it blocked legitimate messages with words that had double meanings. More so, in the Charter Communications Company, the spam created a nuisance since it reached the customers inboxes together with viruses.
Following this, it implies that the managers of these companies as well as other companies that are encountering the problem of spam are faced with the challenge of dealing with this problem in a most effective way.
Conclusion
There is a great need for coming up with a solution or even solutions to deal with the problem of spam. Some of the ways that might be effective, which the managers of the organizations may employ, can be borrowed from those used by the three companies considered in this case.
For instance, the Pier 1 Company came up with a solution to deal with the problem of spam by using MailFrontier Enterprise Gateway and this works most effectively with the email soft ware of Microsoft. The MailFrontier is put in front of Microsoft Exchange in order to carry out the inspection of the emails that come in. It in turn accepts only those messages that are good and does not accept spam. This software has enabled the stopping of up to 98 percent of all spam.
More so, considering the case for the Charter Communications Company, this company these days uses two tools that are unique to deal with spam from IronPort. The first tool is the Iron Port C60 e-mail security appliance that allows the company to divide those who send emails in unique categories and for every sender, this tool offers specific thresholds for the acceptance or rejection of the email messages. The next tool which is referred to as “Reputation Filtering” complements the first tool and this one allows the administrators to sort email senders basing on the significance of the mail. Those messages that are of poor quality are not accepted.
The First Banking Services Company has come up with its own way of dealing with spam. They use what is called Mail Warden Pro. This spam-fighting solution allows users to come up with rules that differentiate between spam and no-spam in a way that is quite flexible. By employing this, the spam has been reduced from as high as sixty five percent to as low as five percent of the total mails (Case study, Para 5).
All these solutions are seen to be effective and the managers of other organizations that are being faced with the problem of spamming can choose any of the above techniques to deal with spam.
Works Cited
Anon. “Dealing with spam.” Queen’s University Belfast. 2010. Web.
MK640w5 Case Study. How Companies Fight Spamming.