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Welcome to the August edition of QTS QuikNews, our
monthly e-mail newsletter. In this monthly e-mail, you
will receive an update of what's new at QTS - new
products we support, new patches and upgrades, solution
ideas and promotions to save you money, and information
about our company and our clients.
In
this issue:
QTS
NEWS
QTS
IS HIRING!
QTS is recruiting for senior level technical personnel,
as well as entry and senior level sales staff. If you
know anyone who might be a good fit, please have them
submit their resume to Liz Meechan, our Office Manager.
Liz can be reached at lmeechan@QTSnet.com,
or (973)984-7600 x223.
PRESIDENT'S
CORNER
This
is a continuation of the column from last month’s
issue, in which we discussed spam and how to prevent it.
After discussing some of the basic techniques, we now
move on to some of the more sophisticated techniques to
combat spam.
*******************************
Some
of the more advanced features in today’s anti-spam
solutions include:
Subject
Line Blocking – some products support the ability to
block messages based on specific text strings in the
subject line – such as “ADV” for advertisements,
or specific offensive words. To do this effectively,
wildcard characters need to be supported. The problem
here is that this needs to be planned in such as way as
to avoid excessive false positives – the string ADV is
used in many ADVertisement messages, but could also
catch a legitimate message about the ADVantage of a
particular service.
Dictionaries
- Keywords can be listed and used to block email.
However, this can have untended effects. For example, I
had several copies of our last QuikAlarm bulletin
bounced back as undeliverable because the text of the
message describing the Bugbear worm listed filename
extensions that a gateway was blocking – presumably,
the gateway thought our email included the files
themselves, and the recipients never got the useful
technical information we were attempting to provide.
Lexical
Analysis essentially means looking not just at words,
but combinations of words, to classify a message. It is
more sophisticated than simple keyword blocking. Some
word combinations may indicate a message is legitimate,
while the same word in other combinations may indicate
spam (I’m avoiding particular words to avoid this
email being caught in a basic spam filter!).
Unfortunately, both of the above solutions can be time
intensive to maintain, unless a vendor is doing this
globally for you (as, for example, does SurfControl).
Heuristics
essentially refers to applying a series of tests and
accumulating a score based on results. This approach has
been used to fight viruses, and is now popular to combat
spam as well. Typically, a neural networks/artificial
intelligence scanning engine applies rules and
“learns” what you consider to be spam, and based on
threshold levels you set it can classify messages and
handle them a certain way (ranging from deletion, to
appending the header, to quarantining them for further
inspection).
Bayesian
Filtering is a relatively new approach that holds much
potential, but will take some time for the technology to
take hold and be integrated with commercial products.
Essentially, this approach looks at a body of email
messages and determines spam based on the user’s
classification of messages, applying artificial
intelligence. One of the key elements here is that it is
user-specific – what is spam to one user may be
legitimate email to another user. Thus, this approach is
most suitable to combat spam at a user/mailbox level,
which has its own disadvantages. It will take some time
before this approach is successfully integrated into
gateway products but allows for user-level interaction,
but the approach holds much potential if it is done
right – the open source projects that have been
developed thus far have a very high accuracy rate and an
associated low rate of false positives.
Subject
Line Tagging – many products that do heuristic
scanning of email messages have the ability to insert a
string (for example, “SPAM”) into the beginning or
end of a subject line. This allows the messages to be
classified for further handling, as opposed to simply
being deleted. For example, identified spam messages
might have “Might be SPAM:” added to the beginning
of the header, and then client side rules might move the
mail into a special folder on the client, where the mail
might be left for 3 days (or more, or less) before it is
automatically deleted. This approach has the advantage
of putting ultimate control of the “questionable”
mail with the user – they don’t get all the
suspected spam in their main mailbox, but can check the
spam folder for possible false positives when they’re
expecting a message or whenever they want. The
disadvantage is that this email is going into their
client mail folders, consuming valuable server-side and
local storage space until it is deleted.
A
nice split is provided by the more advanced products,
such as SurfControl Mail, which allow messages that are
highly likely to be spam to be deleted before being
forwarded, and others to be classified with the subject
line header and passed along for the user to decide.
How
is the industry reacting to spam? Of course, it varies
by organization, but many in leadership roles have
gotten into the fray. Both Novell GroupWise 6.5 and the
upcoming release of Microsoft Exchange 2003 will include
native support for RBLs and some levels of whitelisting/blacklisting
(though we still strongly recommend a
server to screen email before it gets to these
servers!). A plethora of vendors have come out with
for-sale products to address spam at the email gateway
(QTS supports SurfControl and Symantec’s offerings),
before getting to the gateway (Postini’s Active EMS
being one of the better and well-known outsourced
offerings) and at the client (McAfee’s SpamKiller
being an example).
There
is no perfect solution here to be had. By properly
configuring multiple elements of the above, one can hope
to cut off a significant percentage of spam, with
limited risk of false positives, but this will take some
tuning and ongoing management. Given time and
improvement in artificially intelligent technologies, it
is possible that gateway solutions will be delivered
that will allow for user-specific classification but
centralized management. In the interim, at least it’s
possible to cut down on the time wasted deleting some of
the junk emails from our inboxes…
As
always, feel free to email me your comments or thoughts
at nrosenberg@QTSnet.com.
Thank you.
Neil
Rosenberg
President & CEO
Quality Technology Solutions
PARTNER
SPOTLIGHT
This
month QTS is spotlighting its business solutions
partner, AKA Enterprise Solutions. AKA is a highly
focused solution provider that provides services around
Microsoft Business Solutions – currently, the Dynamics
(formerly Great Plains) accounting systems, and
Microsoft CRM. These solutions are a great fit for most
of QTS’ mid-market customers.
For
more than a decade, AKA Enterprise Solutions has been a
leading partner dedicated to the sales, consulting,
service and support of Microsoft Business Solutions. AKA
Enterprise Solutions provides solutions that address
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer
Relationship Management (CRM), e-Commerce and Business
Process Consulting and Custom Application Development.
AKA’s
dedication and focus on the Microsoft Great Plains and
Microsoft CRM products benefits their clients by
providing increased access to knowledge and dedicated
resources for all areas of customer care. As a certified
Microsoft Business Solutions partner, AKA shares
Microsoft's commitment to long lasting customer
relationships exemplified by a 93% client customer
retention rate and consistently high satisfaction
ratings.
AKA
Enterprise Solutions has been the recipient of numerous
industry awards and national honors that serve to
reflect the combined talents, innovation, and enthusiasm
of the team members. AKA was the 2001 recipient of the
Eagle Award, the highest award given to Microsoft
Business Solutions partner organizations recognizing
strong leadership, a commitment to excellence and
extreme dedication to customers and partners. Of the
4,000 Microsoft Business Solutions partners worldwide,
AKA is routinely ranked within the top fifteen companies
in the world. As part of their dedication to Microsoft
Business Solutions, AKA has maintained the only North
East certified Microsoft Great Plains Education Center
for the past three years.
As
an InterDyn company, AKA Enterprise Solutions offers
clients the advantage of specialized talents and
industry expertise of each of our locations to maintain
the highest quality of customer care services. With more
than 500 certified professionals in locations around the
world, InterDyn supports over 3,500 customers- making us
the largest, most comprehensive, and most experienced
Microsoft Business Solutions partner worldwide. For more
information about AKA Enterprise Solutions visit http://www.akaes.com,
or contact your QTS Account Manager.
QTS
and AKA Enterprise Solutions work together for our
customers to build new solutions that create competitive
advantage, reduce costs or create opportunity - with QTS
providing the infrastructure and AKA the software
solutions, in a highly integrated fashion.
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