Spam: Arriving en masse to an e-mail address near you

InfoWorld - Shifting from daily nuisance to serious IT and business concern, uncontrolled spam is prompting customers to arm themselves with tools to fight back against productivity loss, potential liability and bandwidth-clogging consequences that unsolicited commercial e-mail can bring to an enterprise.
Targeting a growing concern on the antispam battlefront, IronPort Systems Inc. yesterday introduced technology designed to prevent legitimate e-mail messages from being weeded out by antispam filters.
IronPort rolled out two e-mail delivery appliances based on the company's Virtual Gateway technology, which allows users to assign a specific outbound IP address to each message based on campaign or message type. The technology, in essence, creates a separate virtual machine for each mailing, separating critical transaction confirmation messages from other marketing messages that might be snared by a spam filter, according to Scott Banister, chairman and chief technology officer of IronPort, in San Bruno, Calif.
"Companies are finding that if they send out e-mail marketing newsletters, increasingly Internet service providers are deploying antispam systems that often inadvertently trap messages that are legitimate," Banister said. "No one wants to be throwing out babies with the bath water."
IronPort's Virtual Gateway ensures that even if a marketing message is trapped by a filter, other traffic being sent from the same infrastructure will be unaffected, he said. The two new delivery appliances, the A60 and A30, are designed for high- and low-volume requirements, respectively.
Similarly, Postini Inc. and BrightMail Inc. last week introduced new antispam products and services designed to help end users restore normalcy to workplace operations being hampered by hundreds upon thousands of e-mail messages targeting random in-boxes and servers over the Internet.
In fact, most corporate customers and service providers are oblivious to the massive amount of spam proliferation caused by automated e-mail address "harvesting" over the Web, said Joyce Graff, vice president and research director of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.
Spam "is burning your resources; it's keeping your message transfer agent busy doing stupid things; it's clogging bandwidth, clogging disk space and, most important, stealing people's time," said Graff. "Even more important, it's creating a very upset work environment."
Graff said tools capable of launching a myriad of spam-related attacks are becoming readily available over the Internet. This enables even beginners to send out spam and fuels con artists to perpetrate hoaxes, identity theft, fraud, bulk junk mail and mass-market advertising. Spammers can easily set up and dispose of multiple free e-mail accounts to hide their tracks.
According to Graff, many spam attacks bombarding enterprises feature increasingly vulgar and insensitive content.

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