Junk E-mail jangles nerves (excerpt)
Susan L. Thomas, LAN Times, February 2 1998
..."I
think the amount of spam continues to increase. There are fewer
big-time spammers, but there are a lot more people getting into it on a
smaller scale," said Dan Birchall, Internet systems administrator at 16
Straight Communications, a Web-hosting, graphic design and marketing
company in Mount Laurel, N.J.
...Birchall said that the number of countermeasures against spam is also
growing, and although he receives more UCE, less of it gets into his
network and reaches the end user.
...The push now is to get vendors to default rather than relay, said 16
Straight's Birchall. On a good day he spends 15 to 30 minutes dealing
with junk E-mail. That means reading it after it has been filtered out
on the server and moved to a folder or calling sites whose servers have
been unknowingly used for unsolicited mail.
...Although Birchall said he has tried to prevent spam at the end-user
level, he has found it is more effective to do it at the server level,
affecting hundreds of people immediately. Critics of cutting mail off at
the servers, however, point to users losing mail they might otherwise
need as well as the administrative costs. Often an administrator will
not reject the mail but move it to a folder for closer scrutiny.
..."If there is a solution, it will be a combination of technical
efforts, educational efforts, and legislative efforts," Birchall said.
