Unless you live under a rock, you likely
receive spam. USA Today estimates that over seven billion spam messages
will be sent out this year alone. Aside from the frustration of sorting
through and deleting these messages, several legal battles are beginning
to take shape. Already the ISPs are jumping in to try to stop spam at
the source, but in June employees began taking their employers to court
because of the pornography appearing in their email. Cisco is now
involved in such a suit since it has claimed (as has most companies)
that the computers and content are their property. The argument is Cisco
should be more active in trying to stop unsolicited pornography and
graphic pictures from coming through the email system. The results of
this case will be interesting to see. Do companies have a legal
requirement to fight spam?
Microsoft is also ready to stop spam. Bill Gates has offered several
discussions on the matter and published a few papers on spam and the
need to stop it. To prove it’s point, Microsoft has included much more
sophisticated spam-fighting features in the newest versions of Outlook
and Exchange. In this article we will describe these functions in detail
and point out both their strengths and weaknesses.
Many of you may remember the anti-spam
tools that shipped with the earlier versions of Exchange and Outlook.
Outlook 98 and 2000 both shipped with a function called Junk E-Mail
filters. With Junk Mail filters, an end user could identify a message as
having adult content so that future messages from that person would be
blocked or otherwise filtered. In addition, Outlook 98 and 2000 included
a hard-coded set of words and phrases that were used to try to identify
junk mail and adult content messages. For example a subject that
contains ‘adults only’ would be caught and filtered. Unfortunately, this
filtered required you to identify the sender after you had already
received a message. In addition, a spam-sender would be identified for
one user and the knowledge could not be shared easily for the other
users. More importantly, the phrase and key-word database could not be
changed, let alone centrally managed. Having said that, these functions
were adequate then since unsolicited mail was roughly one-sixth what it
is now.
I would be surprised if many of you knew that Exchange 5.5 had basic
Spam-fighting tools. These reverse DNS lookup and IP blocking features
were slightly improved with Exchange 2000. Reverse DNS lookup helped
block messages from servers who were spoofing other domains or were not
valid. Diligent administrators, who watched incoming messages, could
block known spam servers. To do this effectively you needed to look at
the header information within the spam messages and collect the sender
server’s IP. You then added this IP in the Block IP fields within
Exchange and hope the spamm’er didn’t change IP addresses. As with the
Outlook features, this technique was somewhat effective several years
ago.
Outlook 2003 Anti-spam tools
For those of you who ware
wondering if you should upgrade to Outlook 2003, let me help you make up
your mind. For starters, Outlook 2003 includes a feature that blocks
html-embedded messages from automatically retrieving pictures from the
Internet.  This feature alone should help reduce much of
the pornography that comes across in unsolicited messages. Spam’mers pay
ISP costs as you and I and they can’t afford to send millions of large
messages since that limits the number of people they can reach. By using
this feature (which is turned on by default) messages that get through
probably won’t contain graphics. This new feature could have probably
helped out the case now pending at Cisco. While this feature does in
effect block linked graphics, it will not help if the image is sent with
the message. Nor will this feature block bold, flashing, offensive text.
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