Spam is such an ever-changing, almost organic thing (think of bacteria or viruses), that it's a wonder scientists haven't tried to study it to cure cancer. Hey, you never know. And while spam, of course, never will do anything good for society (much like the food item it's named for), it's ever-changing nature makes it difficult for companies to eliminate spam.

Over time, the number of spam messages flooding company email servers has been steadily increasing. Spammers are just getting better and better at adapting their "art" and working around anti-spam email server security. They also adapt it to the people who receive it, doing their best to take advantage of our many insecurities (after all, don't we all worry about the size of various parts of our bodies?) to get that click. Or that check.

Because of course spammers don't send out spammy emails just to mess with us-- though I'm sure that's fun for them too. They do it to get important information (both personal and about a company) from too-gullible recipients, or to scam people into purchasing un-useful or even non existent products. Or just to get a click to a virus-producing website.

Not nice stuff. And while you should be concerned about spam on your personal computer, companies have to keep an even closer eye on spam. Many estimates state that up to 90% of the email received by business email servers is spam. And of course, dealing with it takes time. You've got to sort through it, toss it away, and obsessively scrub your hands with bleach afterward. Not good for productivity.

While viruses do pose a danger to companies, the truth is that a reduction in productivity is the major way in which spam makes companies lose money. But spam also eats up valuable bandwidth and ups costs for network infrastructure and storage. It's just a pain in the rear all-round.

But can your company effectively put a stop to spam?

Actually, it can. First, employees need to be trained in ways to keep spam from having a real effect on company computers. They need to delete any suspicious emails, and never give personal information. Second, it's a good idea to limit an employee's access to peer-to-peer sites (infamous breeding grounds for Trojans, worms, and malware that can turn their computer into a spam-producing machine), and disallow the installation of any unauthorized software.

Last you'll want to put an anti spam filter into place. Don't skimp when it comes time to buy anti-spam software for your server. You want the good stuff - the software that can identify all the different types of spam without deleting any important email. It needs to be a near-perfect filter. Below are a few features this anti spam filter should have.

Installing spam protection directly on the server (rather than on an individual workstation) both eliminates the need to have extra software on employee computers, and is cheaper to license. It also stops spam before it enters the company's network, rather than at each user's inbox. As a bonus, this kind of anti-spam protection can also learn, assembling information about the spam it blocks in order to block future spam even better.

You don't want one-trick-pony spam protection. For instance, protection that only works by identifying spammy keywords can't hold up against spammers' methods of avoiding keyword filtering with images, audio files, etc. Instead, use spam protection with Bayesian filtering. This method of filtering uses mathematics to "teach" the software what types of messages are spam. It also incorporates whitelists and examines email headers against both custom and public blacklists.

If the main spam worry for companies is a reduction in productivity, imagine how much productivity would be affected by a product that filtered out lots of real emails along with the spam. It's worse than no spam filter at all. You want a spam filter with the lowest possible number of false positives.

Of the many anti-spam products on the market, GFI MailEssentials is one of the most prestigious. In use in over 80,000 companies worldwide, this software has won more than 70 awards due to its ability to stop over 98% of incoming spam right in its tracks-- with perhaps the lowest number of false positives in the industry. How does GFI MailEssentials do this? It uses all of the elements described above to stop spam dead. It:

1. Uses an automatic whitelist to reduce false positives
2. Allows administrators to adjust their spam filters using keywords.
3. Works on the server level, stopping spam before it enters the network.
4. Uses second-generation Bayesian filtering to analyze content, along with ham data that is specific to the company it's installed in.
5. Uses many types of spam filtering technology, such as blacklist creation and checking and intelligent mail header analysis.

A free trial download is available. Pass it on to your network administrator!