Bosses still clueless about spam problem

Companies are failing to combat the problem of spam because of an inability to come to terms with the issues and technologies surrounding it.

According to research from mail-filtering company Clearswift, the picture is one of general confusion, with companies rolling out ineffective technologies and failing to address and understand the impact of spam on their business.

Almost 50 per cent of companies who have introduced anti-spam software are unhappy with the results, according to the findings. This is unsurprising given that 59 per cent of companies admitted to using key word-based filtering - a method now largely discredited because of its ineffective filtering and the high instances of false positives. Twenty per cent of companies have implemented no kind of spam filtering.

And it's not just the technology which companies are failing to get their heads around. While 86 per cent of companies claim to be concerned about their spam problem, only 63 per cent claim to inform their staff about the best ways of dealing with spam. Often it is a lack of employee understanding, which can see staff open spam emails, link through to sites or reply, that leads to increasing levels of unsolicited email within a company.

Alyn Hockey, director of research at Clearswift, said: "Everybody seems to be worried about spam but when it comes to actually doing something about it they are failing to do so effectively."

"A lot of companies are putting things in place to deal with the problem but I don't think they really know much about what they are putting in. Spam solutions should be managed like anti-virus solutions. They need to be constantly updated and managed, to take account of the spammers' changing tactics."

Hockey agreed that key-word searches are far from effective. "If users are using text analysis on its own then they are going to have a lot of problems," he added.