SPAMers exist because it is profitable for them to abuse you, your employees, and your computer network. Computer industry observers predict an ever increasing volume of SPAM because human nature and the profit motive ensure a never ending supply of disreputable individuals out for a fast dollar.

Even attempts to legislate SPAM out of existence have been futile. SPAMers operate from all over the globe. A SPAMer based in the US can, for example, subvert an email server in France to deliver his junk mail to you via the Internet. Or, he might commandeer your email server to do his work placing you at risk for facilitating SPAM.

You only have two options:
Do nothing and allow the volume of SPAM to steadily increase as SPAMers become ever wealthier at your expense. Aggressively fight SPAM and regain control over your business resources.

What doesn't work:
SPAM filtering has been tried for years. It doesn't work very well for a variety of reasons, and requires substantial ongoing maintenance to try to guess what keyword or series of keywords to filter on.
SPAMers bypass filters by purposely misspelling words likely to trigger a filter rule, or simply enhance their message by embellishing how their message is delivered. A filter rule may catch the words "mortgage" or "Viagra", but might miss "M-O-R-T-G-A-G-E" or "Viaggra" knowing full well that the reader will mentally correct the message.

Email messages delivered with embedded graphics can bury the triggering keywords as pictures that the reader mind will recognize for what they are, but will evade the filters looking for strings of text.

SPAMer lists have been developed to identify the sources of SPAM, but just as your business can change from one Internet Service Provider to another, and from one IP address range to another, so can the SPAMers. They are an elusive moving target that can only temporarily be stopped by attempting to refuse mail from certain cataloged SPAM sources.

What does work:
SPAMstomper™ uses a SPAMer's modus operandi against him. Without any filtering, and without any 3rd party maintained lists, SPAMstomper™ will stop SPAM from reaching your desk, and will eliminate the numerous daily interruptions only to discover that you've been alerted to the presence of another SPAM message.

SPAMers use bogus return email addresses to fool email servers into accepting their messages. SPAMstomper™ automatically challenges all email from a new source and uses the return address in an attempt to contact the sender. If the sender can't be contacted to elicit a confirmation, SPAMstomper™ will trash the original message. Please be patient for a full detailed explanation of how this works in practice in an upcoming section.

The business case:
You can do your own arithmetic calculations, but here's a conservative sample scenario.

Let's say you have 50 email users. They each get 10 SPAM messages per day. That's 500 unnecessary business interruptions per day that you are paying for. The interruptions may be the most costly aspect of SPAM for many of your employees, but it's hard to put a figure on it. Let's use something we can compute.

If the employee finds the SPAM to be a nuisance, he/she may only take a few seconds to delete each message. If the employee finds the SPAM to be something of interest, he/she may hit the accompanying referenced WEB site and waste a half hour getting a new credit card, qualifying for a new mortgage, ogling a few scantily clad coeds, etc., on your time.

If on average, each piece of SPAM wastes just 10 seconds, then you've lost a little over 80 minutes of productivity per day, or over 2 months worth of productivity over the entire year. What is 2 months of salary and benefits worth at your facility for the lowest paid employee? That's what SPAM is costing on an annual basis.

50 users * 10 SPAMs * 10 seconds * 245 days = 340 hours = 8.5 work weeks.

Now add in the viruses attached to SPAM, the Internet bandwidth consumed in its delivery and the email server resources required to process and store it, and SPAM is no longer just a nuisance. It's a business problem.

Is your site a SPAM gateway?
Many older email servers are known to be exploitable as SPAM gateways. They are said to be "open relays". SPAMers scour the Internet using programs designed to find such vulnerable email servers. Once found, they use those servers to their advantage.

A SPAMer may send a single message to an open relay containing 10,000 delivery addresses. That single email message is then repeatedly relayed to those 10,000 recipients by the compromised open relay email server using the Internet connection and associated resources available to it.

The SPAMer may use his own legitimate Internet connection to send just one email to a compromised server, possibly in another state or country. His costs to do so might be $20/month for a dial up Internet connection. If he sent just one such email per day, he can cause 300,000 emails to be sent on his behalf monthly. All for just $20. If he sends 10 such emails per day, then he has caused 3,000,000 SPAM emails to frustrate the rest of us. Again, all for $20. If he can charge someone just one thousandth of a cent per email, his $20 investment returns $3,000. That's why SPAM isn't likely to disappear.

The target open relay email server will use its owner's resources to repeat the SPAMers email message to as many recipients as the SPAMer specified, unbeknownst to the owner. The target server's owner is a SPAM facilitator, and in some jurisdictions is held accountable should a SPAM recipient trace the email back to his server. His costs and legal exposure are orders of magnitude higher than the SPAMer's, with no up side potential. Therefore, anyone with a compromised email server should seriously consider rectifying that situation.

You can have a third party test your email server to see if it can be used as an open relay. Visit www.ordb.org and follow the instructions. Note that if your email server is confirmed to be an open relay, it will be added to a list that many companies use to reject email from. You may find that you can no longer communicate with your business partners because they use the open relay list to reject emails from all known open relays, including yours.

SPAMstomper™ is a full function email server that is properly configured not to be a SPAM gateway.