Controlling Spam: Here's What One Agency Did

The filter lets the agency allow e-mail from specific people or vendors to get through. On the flip side, it can be set up to bar specific people from e-mailing messages to the firm.

“If you have someone sending abusive or harassing e-mail to someone in your company, you can block that person out relatively easily,” he notes.

There was a little training involved in getting the information technology department to check routinely for messages that should have gone through. The firms employees also had to be taught that if they were waiting for an important e-mail that had not come through to “give a shout” to the IT department and check if it was sitting in the filter.

“People thought it was worth the burden because of all the junk they were no longer getting on their machines,” says Millan.

Before installing the filter, when he would come in on a Monday, Millan says he could find about 300 e-mails in his inbox from over the weekend. After the filter was installed the number dropped to 50, he notes.

Today, says Eddie Ferrel, the current director of information technology for Lanier, more than 48,000 e-mails went through the filtering system over a seven-day period, and on one weekend alone 11,000 messages were stopped by the filter. Of the 48,000 that went into the filter, 25% went through to their destination, leaving the remaining 75% to be reviewed by the IT department as spam.

“That takes some time, but it gives you an opportunity to look at it and stop it,” says Ferrel. “In terms of productivity of your employees, it saves them time from having to read through and delete it.”

To get a measure of how much spam costs a company, SurfControl did a survey of 700 IT professionals in 2002. It found that each spam message costs $1 in worker productivity to a company.

Susan Getgood, senior vice president of marketing for SurfControl, says there is more to spam than just the annoyance of unwanted e-mails. There is loss of productivity and bandwidth, due to the constant flow of unwanted e-mails clogging up the system and needing to be deleted.

For insurance companies, she notes, there is the additional burden from federal regulations to keep clients files safe, secure and confidential. She says there is the concern that some spam could create unwanted contacts or it could be designed to pull client information out of the agencys files.

SurfControl uses what she says is a rules-based system that allows an agencys rules for Internet use to be translated to the desktop. Clients have 30 days to evaluate the software, which they can download themselves, and in that time can craft how and what e-mail they want to capture or let through.

A typical investment in this providers product will run about $18 per user in a firm of 500 and slightly more for smaller firms and agencies, she says. It also requires either adequate server space or its own personal computer to operate.

“What e-mail filtering really does is it certainly stops the spam, but it also helps companies get a handle on all of these other threats and really manage the use of these services for business use,” says Getgood. “That is the long-term view [agents] should take when thinking about these technologies. Yes, I want to stop spam, because thats my problem today, but I also want to invest in something that will help my company be more profitable in the long run.”

SurfControls Web site is located at www.surfcontrol.com.

Mark E. Ruquet is an assistant editor for NUs Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, August 25, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.