dovecot - Jan 2007 - 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

Well, for starters, Dovecot is an IMAP server and doesn't really get
involved in the spam side of things at all.

You'd be better off directing your question to mailing lists such as
the Exim, Postfix, Sendmail or even Courier one, which deal with MTA
issues. However, you may find that your query will be treated as
off-topic and spam :)

To answer your question, I'd be surprised if any CIO worth his/her
salt wasn't aware of how difficult the spam situation is at the
moment. It affects anyone with email directly. My only comment here
would be that there is no magic technical bullet to deal with spam,
although large-sample filtering seems to work OK.

-- 
Juha
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha

On Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:14 PM -0700 Esther Schindler 
<esther at bitranch.com> wrote:
> 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.
What became of this?

I neglected my dovecot mailing list folder for a couple weeks and just saw 
this. I'd also recommend contacting the MIMEDefang mailing list 
(http://mimedefang.org/) and SpamAssassin (http://spamassassin.org/).