Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Got this email at work today

All,

The spam filter is online now and it is catching a lot of spam. It is also catching some legitimate email also. This is the double edge sword in trying to find a good solution. No matter how hard we try and no matter which product we choose it will still catch some of the email that is legitimate. We will be sending out a document soon showing steps that need to be taken daily to deal with this.

There is an intern that is coming in at 4pm and will work until 6pm for a couple of weeks. She will be coming around to help anyone who would like a little one on one to understand the process. Her name is Corine Stone. Please help her feel welcome.

One more thing to note, please DO NOT delete the email that is being sent to you from Barracuda Spam Firewall [*************]. This email has some user login information that you will need.



Here is the email from Barracuda spam:

Welcome to the Barracuda Spam Firewall. This message contains the information you will need to access your Spam Quarantine and Preferences.
Your account has been set to the following username and password:
Username: *******************

Password: *******************

So I went to Preferences->Quarantine Enable/Disable

And I saw this:
Enable/Disable Quarantine

Enable Quarantine: Yes or No

"Yes" recommended. If "No" selected, messages that would ordinarily be quarantined will be delivered with "[QURA]" in the subject line

The spam filter catches and quarantines email is deems as spam. I don't know the quality of the spam filter, I just know that I don't have a problem with spam. I keep my work email to myself (you know like not giving it away to porn sites), it is kinda like keeping your rabbit in you pants. Keeping you rabbit in your pants or your email to yourself is really the safest thing to do in most situations.

So I choose no, and un-did all the work they had done in one min.

cube

update:
Heard the network admin complaining that emails with the work "ink" or "inc." were being quarantined. I don't hold a very high opinion of this man abilities, and this does not help any.

2 comments:

Brian said...

You know, I've never really understood the rabid anti-spam crowd. C'mon, how much of an inconvenience is it really to hit the delete key a half dozen times? Even if you have to delete a hundred spam messages a day, what's that take, like 5 seconds?

I'm with you --- spam filters that catch real email are way more of a pain than just deleting the spam.

Man of Issachar said...

I agree with you on a personal basis as far as chooseing to use anti spam software,though i think spam might still be a problem. Though i have heard some numbers that Spam accounts for a very large portion of emails sent (though i don't know if (the volume of spam) that is a problem, but bear with me and just say that it is).

It is kinda like, junk mail. If the senders of junk mail did not have to pay for the mail we would have a lot more junk mail, but they pay a fee (although greatly reduced fee). Email is essentially free, so you have huge amounts of junk mail.

Though that does not mean that i want the goverment to handle it.

For a large company, their might be some savings that could occur (a person time, hardware savings, etc.) if many of your employees got huge amounts of spam. Though for a medium sized company, with low spam i don't know.

At my particluar company, i think it was a good idea. Because of the nature of the work for many of the employees (manual entry of freight bills).

I am just amazed that i was able to turn it off so quickly.