TVA unleashes ‘spam’ killer on unwanted e-mail
KNOXVILLE (AP) — The Tennessee Valley Authority has unleashed a “spam killer” on the more than 20,000 unsolicited and unwanted electronic messages that flood its computer network each month.
Pornography, financial scams, advertisements, dating services and eBay auction notifications are the first to be targeted. Later, if the technology will allow it, pop-up ads on Internet sites will be filtered.
“We started getting lots of complaints and actually began monitoring our e-mail systems,” said Anthony Smith, the federal utility’s senior security manager for information technology.
The results were startling. About 10 percent to 20 percent of TVA’s 13,000 employees regularly get junk e-mail. During a five-week period late last year, more than 100,000 spam messages were tallied.
“These unsolicited e-mails adversely impact computer bandwidth, resulting in a slower computer response time and disk space where spam resides,” Smith told an internal TVA publication. “And the time employees devote to dealing with spam impacts productivity.”
Even if it only takes an employee five to seven seconds to identify and delete a spam message — an industry estimate — the compounded effect is significant. Eliminating spam could save more than $2,500 in avoided costs per month, TVA’s information technology team calculated.
So TVA began installing an automatic junk e-mail blocker called “Spam Killer” from McAfee Security in November.
Since then, the volume of spam in the TVA system has held steady while the number of spam complaints is falling, Smith said.
The second phase in the anti-spam campaign is identifying potential spam messages and flagging them for employees. Subject lines in the e-mails are clearly tagged “spam.” Employees then tell Smith’s team whether they want to receive similar e-mails in the future.
“The third phase is to see if we could get technology capable of actually catching some of the pop-up ads that seem to plague end users from a productivity standpoint,” Smith said.
Smith said this is available for individual computers, but he’s looking for a network-wide solution that won’t interfere with legitimate programs that require pop-up technology.
Even with the right technology, it still isn’t an easy fix. “Sometimes it is tough to differentiate between what is true business information,” Smith said. “It may be spam to one and (not) … to another.”
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On the Net:
TVA: http://www.tva.gov/
Spam Killer: http://softwho.com/mcafee-spamkiller.htm
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