Holding back the spam tide
Karen Dearne
APRIL 04, 2006
case study | Amnesty International Australia
INBOXES overflowing with spam were only half the problem for Amnesty International Australia - the filters were also blocking legitimate email.
“As a human rights organisation, our email addresses are very public, and that tends to makes us vulnerable to spam,” Amnesty information systems manager Steven Douek says.
“As well, most of our staff take part in a large number of email lists all over the world. Changing email addresses or trying to remove ourselves from those lists wasn’t really an option.”
So the IT team began looking at spam filtering products.
It wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
“We tried five or six spam filtering products and with all of them we experienced a very high false positive rate,” he says.
“At the same time, we were still getting a large amount of spam hitting our mailboxes.”
Douek says this was because filters based on policy rules “pick out emails that we send or receive and block them because of the language being used in relation to human rights abuses”…
