New Year's Resolution 3: Improve your e-mail

Why are so many technical advances a constant balance between useful and frustrating? I nominate e-mail as one of the most helpful yet aggravating advances when you judge easy communications against spam and mail-borne viruses. Make another resolution to improve your e-mail situation this year.

New Year's Resolution: Collaborate or else
New Year's Resolution 2: Better sales compensation management

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Why are so many technical advances a constant balance between useful and frustrating? I nominate e-mail as one of the most helpful yet aggravating advances when you judge easy communications against spam and mail-borne viruses. Make another resolution to improve your e-mail situation this year.

New Year's Resolution: Collaborate or else
New Year's Resolution 2: Better sales compensation management

One way to improve e-mail, as I wrote back in October, is to Get More Work Done with Less E-Mail. But since you can't get away from e-mail completely, you need to get a better handle on spam, e-mail security, e-mail archiving, and encryption for certain communications. Luckily, hundreds of vendors offer you such services, including one you probably didn't know about: Google.

Well, not so much Google themselves as Postini, bought by Google over a year ago. Postini was a small player in the big market, and now they're part of a huge player trying to break into that market. When they called to tell me their plans, they said the right things, but they have to gain some market share to make me believe it.

Before we dive into Google Apps Security Services, you need to decide what you have and what you need. Do you have a good spam solution? I've always favored a two step filter process: one before your e-mail server, and one at the client. Block most of the spam before it gets into your e-mail server, then let users filter out the rest. Search for “network spam filter” and you'll get millions of results. Is there anyone out there with no network spam filters at all?

You can put spam filters on your server with software, on your network with appliances, or use a hosted service. I like the hosted service offerings because they work before the spam onslaught floods your server and clogs up your bandwidth. The farther away you can stop the spam, the better.

That's the method Postini/Google uses for their spam and virus security service. For $12 per user per year, you route all your mail through Google/Postini and they clean it up for you before it hits your network and e-mail server. The pricing is good (some competitors are in the $2 to $3 per user per month range), and there's no hardware or software to buy. Even better, you get the bandwidth back that spam steals from you today.

Spam makes up 90% of all e-mail traffic some days, so blocking that flood before it hits you can really extend the useful life of your mail server. If you already outsource your e-mail server, you won't notice a huge bandwidth boost. If you host your own e-mail server in house, adding an upstream spam and virus filter will really boost your server's performance. I've talked to numerous small companies that were about to buy a new server just because spam processing bogged theirs down so much. Adding an upstream spam filter allowed them to postpone spending tens of thousands of dollars.

If you don't like the idea of an upstream spam filtering service, but your server-based spam processing is slowing your server, try an appliance. Putting a hardware appliance in front of your e-mail server will take the spam processing burden off your mail server. The price of the appliance is always, I repeat always, less expensive than buying and installing a new mail server. Your bandwidth will still be taken up by spam, but the spam won't eat your server's CPU cycles.