Real World Computing

No more spam?

While working, Mark invariably keeps his email client open and is alerted to any emails coming in by Outlook's pop-up mechanism, so that hopefully he can respond quickly should he need to. Spam gets dealt with in the client by the superb Cloudmark system, but this still means that arriving spam sets off the alert, which can be most distracting. So when SoftScan (www.softscan.co.uk) rang up the other day to suggest Mark try out its anti-spam and anti-virus system for email, he thought it was worth a go.

The way this system works is that the DNS MX record for your domain gets changed so that all email is redirected via SoftScan's servers, which then clean and quarantine any suspect email, forwarding the known good ones to your mail server. This also reduces the bandwidth that spam consumes on your system: in fact, Mark has found that more than 80 per cent of messages arriving at his server had been spam related.

While there are other systems like the SoftScan one, what appealed to Mark was the ability for a user to mark an email as spam and to add its sender to the black list from within Outlook, rather than having to go to a web page to do so. This closing of the loop makes the whole system much more controllable and user-friendly. The system sends an email each day detailing the 'borderline' mails received, and from within this email it's possible to release any that have been marked as possible spam but which shouldn't be quarantined. However, it must be said that this hasn't been necessary after the first couple of weeks, once the system has been 'trained'.

The odd spam still gets through, but to give you some idea of the difference the system has made let's look at the stats for 20 Dec to 4 Jan. There were 62,000 emails, of which 54,000 were spam, bearing some 200 viruses that would have occupied 250MB of storage on the mail server. The average delay for forwarding a clean email through the SoftScan system was less than four seconds.

It was most strange to come back after the Christmas break and find just a few emails sitting in the inbox, all of which were worth reading, and it has made collection of mail via a mobile device useful again. Mark has been so pleased with the system that he's paid real money for a year's subscription, and will recommend it to his clients without question. If removing spam from your life is important to you and you're prepared to pay about £30 a month (depending on the number of users), this could be a solution for you and your poor old mail server.

Checking the network

A couple of issues ago, Mark wrote about some of the trials and tribulations of managing the network at the World Bridge Championships in Estoril. The other day, a product landed in his lap that would have made the task somewhat easier. The software, which goes under the name of LANSurveyor by Neon (www.neon.com), produces a map of your entire network and enables you to examine each of the devices connected to it. Its features go beyond simple mapping, as it can scan for threats, as well as producing software and hardware reports to ensure your licensing is up to date.

One useful report, which takes a little time to run, is the backup profile, which will tell you how much data per hour is changing on each machine, so you're able to plan a sensible backup strategy. You can obviously monitor computers on the LAN, but also any other device with SNMP capabilities, so managed switches can report back too. As soon as a machine joins the network, the administrator gets alerted and the machine is added to the map. Larger networks can be split into areas, so you might have more intensive monitoring of, say, the wireless section of your network where machines may come and go most frequently. Its ability to keep track of all the various items of equipment on your network without having to log into their individual web pages makes a product like this a must-have for anyone looking after servers that are exposed to the Internet and all the problems that can involve.