The spam that still gets through

John Halamka, CIO at CareGroup Health System in Boston, details his enterprise's fight against spam:

At BIDMC, we receive an average of 886,674 emails every day from the internet. We deliver 57,103 of these, meaning that 829,751 of these are Spam. This translates into 302,859,115 Spam per year or over a third of a BILLION Spam.

And he describes the challenges of fighting spam with not blocking legitimate mail, what with spammers constantly figuring out how to adjust for filtering technologies:

Two types of Spam still get through

1. Spammers embed graphics of advertisements instead of text. Since computers cannot read graphics, we cannot filter them

2. Spammers use words that are not unique i.e. "enhance your being a male" that cannot be filtered without removing legitimate email

He follows up with a post on e-mail triage.

• Security
• spam