OT: E-ChannelNews - Do We Really Need This?

[Mike Schwartz (PC Support)]

> Mine is definitely on the rise.  I get about 2000-3000 per week thrown
> into my "held mail" folder for suspected spam.  There are almost zero
> false-positives.  (There are far more false negatives -- sometimes a
> few dozen in a day, though usually less than ten.)
> --
> KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>

     It's those false-positives that are the problem.  A few years ago, one
of my smaller manufacturing customers switched over to handling their email
internally using MS-Exchange and a Symantec anti-spam product.  The guy who
set it up was a bookkeeper with no formal computer training, and he didn't
realize that important engineering changes were being diverted into the spam
folder occasionally.  Nobody was reviewing the "spam" in the folder.  It was
set to automatically delete the spam after 10 days or some such thing, so
these vital emails were simply lost.  

     The net cost to the company was that the lions share of the profit for
that year was flushed right down the toilet.  It would have been worse if I
hadn't stopped down there to do some FilePro work and caught wind of what
was going on.

Mike Schwartz