Is Spam Really a Problem?

Some folks don't think spam really is a problem, and that's because they haven't given out their email address, and a spammer hasn't harvested it. Spam is currently the biggest scourge of the Internet. The estimates are that more than 55% of all emails can be marked as spam, and this is of course eating up an enormous amount of valuable resources. Here are some of the hidden costs of spam:

• False-positives (pertinent messages are blocked)

• Identity theft

• Loss of productivity

• Security breaches (open relay attacks)

• Increased operation costs

• Downtime (denial-of-service attacks)

• Loss of reputation (placed on a realtime blacklist [RBL])

• Legal liabilities

• Lost employee confidence

This chapter introduces you to the features in GroupWise that can act as a piece of your spam solution. However, it is important to note that you should not rely wholly on the spam-control features in GroupWise; they are not sufficient to block the wide variety of spam messages out there.

We highly recommend that you look into a spam solution such as those from Novell's GroupWise partners. We will not make a recommendation as to which product you should buy; we simply recommend that any one of these solutions is better than nothing.