that it is a drop in the bucket. Because most organizations follow
some standard addressing rules for email addresses (first initial,
last name; first name.last name; etc.) bots can still be used to
harvest addresses from Web sites.
Strong perimeter security will often prove to be a better answer to
the problem. I would have to agree with the others that the Barracuda
is a very effective (and cost reasonable) solution if you choose to
bring SPAM filtering in house. For larger or more complex
organizations, IronPort may be a better option but it also comes with
a fairly substantial price tag thanks to the Cisco logo).
Of the hosted solutions, Postini is probably still considered the best
solution (I have not seen the latest from Gartner's benchmarks,
however). One of the only draw backs I have had with Postini is the
ease of integration with Active Directory but Google's programmers
have been revamping several toolsets to allow synchronization between
AD and Postini and it has proven quite stable in the places I have
used it lately.
On 3/19/09, Andrew Burnett <ABurnett@saintgertrude.org> wrote:
> We are using Barracuda as well. Very effective, but you must tweak it
> from the default or suggested thresholds so that it will catch most
> junk.
>
>
> Andrew Burnett
> Director of Technology
> Saint Gertrude High School
> 3215 Stuart Ave
> Richmond VA 23221
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: A forum for independent school educators
> [mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of CHRISTOPHER BUTLER
> Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 10:08 AM
> To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
> Subject: Re: Email Addresses/Spam
>
> Many websites these days use little javascript tools to mask email
> addresses
> on websites (our site which is managed by Finalsite does this). This
> leaves
> them clickable to end users, but invisible to bots that scan the raw
> html.
>
> Many email addresses that spammers get are obtained by bots that scan
> the
> raw html of webpages looking for content that is in the form of an
> email;
> that is, two blocks of text connected by the '@' symbol. The beauty of
> the
> javascript tool is that the raw html has nothing that looks like an
> email
> address, but the rendered web page presents something that looks like an
> email address and that when clicked acts like a mailto: reference.
>
> As for the other question about filters, currently I'm pretty happy with
> our
> Barracuda. We've got it locked down pretty tight with very few false
> positives and very little leakage of bad emails. It took a while to get
> it
> to this point but now needs very little maintenance.
>
> Christopher
>
> --
> Christopher Butler
> Academic Technology Director
> St. John's Preparatory School
> http://www.stjohnsprep.org
>
>
>
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--
Sent from my mobile device
TJ Rainsford
E: tjrainsford@gmail.com
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