SPAM Is On The Rise:

It's true and getting worse all the time. SPAM is a seemingly innocuous, ever present annoyance on the web these days. It is a method of sales and advertisement used by both online marketers and criminals to make a sale by almost any means possible. Sometimes, more often than not these days, those means involve what is being termed as a drive by attack. When a so-called drive-by attack is launched via unsolicited email. The hope is that an unsuspecting user will either open the message and click on a link and thus whisked away to a bogus web site where the unsuspecting users' computer is subjected to any number of probes and possibly infected with an assortment of Virii and/or Tojans that attempt to take control of the users' computer. Once infected the computer attempts to find other hosts to infect and spread itself across the internet.

The Victims:

Sadly, the victims of these attacks are almost always internet aware computer users that fall prey to these attacks. The attacks are disguised as messages from Pay Pal accounts, Bank Account notices, or marketing offers for products at greatly reduced prices. Even more insidious messages are being crafted in such a manner as to appear to be coming from the actual person they're being sent to which results in the messages being accepted by the receiving mail server and then passed through the filters because the sender appears in the white list. This method renders most expensive, main-stream anti-spam software virtually useless requiring more and more administrative over-head in an attempt to stay ahead of the onslaught.

An Anti-SPAM Systems' Strength And Weakness:

The systems' strength is often its lists and methods and abilities to detect unwanted SPAM messages. This usually requires paid-for subscriptions from the software vendor that must be renewed on an annual basis. No matter what the system is the weakest part of the system is the users behind the system. It only takes one user not paying attention distracted by something demanding more of their attention than the current list of emails in their Inbox to open the wrong message. These days, if the message is crafted right it doesn't even require the user to click on an attachment or a URL; the payload is embedded directly in the message and is activated when the message is opened. Most major vendor anti-spam implementations use heuristics which don't work because the messages are changing so much and often. There's no real way for the vendors to effectively keep up because there's an inherent lag time between the new signature discovered and the release of the rule(s) to deal with it. This is known as a single-layered approach and will eventually fail.

There Are Many Solutions:

There are lots of good anti-spam solutions out there, and just as many terrible and ineffective anti-spam solutions. SPAM is here to stay; it's not going anywhere, and in fact, is getting worse. All the legislation that Washington can come up with is not going to make it go away. The smart and effective way is to take advantage of a method that makes managing SPAM cost effective as well as having low administrative over-head.

Linux Kills SPAM Dead:

By leveraging the extremely cost-effective Open Source Linux Operating System and enterprise level tools available for Linux we use a layered approach for the Linux Email Gateway to take total control over all email that comes into your network. Using our proven method you could see the volume of SPAM daily filling your Inbox from hundreds to a few to the occassional SPAM that manages to slip through. You're never going to stop them all, but it is possible to bring it under control in a manageable fashion so that you can get on with the business of your business and put an end to countless hours spent on manually setting up filters, missing important messages because it got caught in an Outlook filter or sorting through your messages. As if this wasn't enough our Linux Email Gateway server will archive inbound messages just in case an important message is accidently deleted or can't be located on your Exchange server or user archive. It gets even better! Because the Operating System and software is so well written this powerful solution will run on much lower cost hardware than Exchange or other Anti-SPAM solutions which require a substantial invenstment in hardware and software costs.

We believe and are committed to the idea that if at all humanly possible no Exchange server should be exposed to the Internet without a Gateway in front of it. An Exchange Email Gateway is a very costly investment and requires quite a bit more administration, whereas the Linux Email Gateway is as fire-and-forget as it gets. Not to mention the software which runs on the Linux Email Gateway server is Open Source which means it costs nothing but the time it takes to install and configure.