Spam Still on the rise By Jake Winemiller April 2004 Here at DNI, we have been fighting the “good fight” for quite some time and updating our policies, procedures, and software to give our mail servers a punchers chance in this battle. No matter how badly we’d like the spam epidemic to vanish, it won’t. In fact, unsolicited mail is still on the rise. According to statistics provided by Excedent Technologies, unsolicited mail coming into their network now outnumbers legitimate email by a ratio of 4 to 1. 80 percent of all incoming mail is now considered spam- has it really come to that? Will the day come when the entire medium of sending and receiving email becomes obsolete because of the deficiencies caused by overwhelming numbers of spam messages? For some it is still just a nuisance that can be deleted and forgotten, but for others it is terribly offensive and starting to cause serious problems with their network, productivity, and loss of bandwidth- which not only costs money, but decreases the performance of your high speed internet connection. For those who don’t mind “just deleting” it, there are other issues that need to be considered. For one, a recent study showed that nearly 2 percent of all spam contains a virus. Do you have your virus definitions updated? Are your sure it is configured properly? Are you sure that it’s checking your email as it comes in? Is your virus software vendor on point with the latest variations of the virus or worm in their updates? These are serious issues and if not taken seriously, they can completely debilitate your computer, network, or company. That is why DNI has instituted some of the most complete spam filtering technologies available and offers virus protection and scrubbing on all the email that passes through our mail servers. Is it perfect? There is no perfect solution and there won’t be any available for several years (if ever), but our system (between filtering and tagging) now eliminates over 90% of spam and correctly identifies spam on a 95%+ clip. No system is 100% and it takes tweaking every single day to fine tune our system as spammers find new ways to bypass the different available filtering techniques, but it’s not a fight that we will be giving up. What’s important is keeping an open line of communication between our support team, and you- our valued client base. We want your feedback- good or bad- and will take every single question or comment into consideration as we move forward and modify our filtering techniques. By getting the honest feedback we need from our clients, we will be able to further enhance our system and increase the value of your service every day. To learn more about our spam filtering and tagging techniques or how yours can be modified, please email support[at symbol goes here]dynamicnet.net or call 1-888-887-6727 today!