Sorry, Spamming Is Against Our Religion

By RaeAnn Slaybaugh

As a church leader, you’re the most unlikely candidate for some of the tasteless e-mails that find their way to your inbox. Read on if you’ve ever wondered where all that spam comes from — and how to stop it.

When the bishop calls to say, “Someone in California just sent me a nasty e-mail asking why our diocese has been forwarding porn,” you’ve got problems. Big ones.

But, as IT Administrator Lee Jones of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond in Richmond, Va., found out, they aren’t insurmountable. Jones, who fielded such a call shortly after he joined the diocese two years ago, says he shut down the server right away and pinpointed the cause: an “open relay” in the Microsoft Exchange 5.5 server the group had used for years. He immediately closed it.

“When you install [Exchange 5.5], it’s allowed to relay mail,” Jones explains. “I assumed — but shouldn’t have — that my predecessor had closed it.”

Still, with one problem down, Jones had plenty more to solve. Some employees began to complain about the 150 to 200 junk e-mails they received every day, many of which peddled prescription drug discounts and proffered countless pornographic products. While most were quick to point out they hadn’t visited any “questionable” websites to elicit such mailings, Jones says that wasn’t among his suspicions anyway. The more likely culprit, he deduced, was vacuuming.

“If you have a website — and our diocese does — probably everyone in the organization’s e-mail address is listed somewhere on it,” he explains. “As spammers, they run a utility that flips through every page of that site looking for anything with at ‘@’ symbol. The utility then pulls out those e-mail addresses and adds them to a mailing list.”

To make matters more confusing, many diocesan employees were having trouble deciphering what e-mails were legitimate and which were bogus among the legions. This was especially challenging for workers whose job it was to serve outside causes, most notably the diocesan refugee and immigration departments.

Jones knew he needed to invest in technology that would not only filter the e-mails, but intelligently so, while still practicing good stewardship. His solution: Nemx Software Corp.’s anti-spam, anti-virus and secure content management products and solutions (www.nemx.com), created exclusively for the Exchange server environment. Nemx tools provide either complete, network-wide protection or simply cost-effective additional levels of defense against spam. With the help of such software, nearly 2,000 pieces of spam are forwarded to a special mailbox every day, which Jones routinely checks for legitimate e-mails. Every few days, he has the pleasure of deleting the many thousands of pieces of cyber junk.

Jones says that in the diocese’s case, a defense mechanism called “heuristics” plays perhaps the biggest role in stopping the annoying barrage of spam. “Let’s say I sent you an e-mail with some sort of profane word in it — it would pick it up,” he says. “But spammers have started replacing some of the letters with numbers, et cetera, to get around some of these types of filters. With the Nemx tools, you can actually add heuristics, which lets you look at [each questionable] word like this to see if it’s worth screening.”

Better yet, Jones gets to choose the level of heuristics he wants. “You can use none if you want words to match exactly, or you can use a low, medium or high setting,” he explains. “So far, I haven’t made use of the high setting because I’m too afraid of it catching stuff it shouldn’t. But low and medium seem to do a good job of keeping up with most spammers.”

Though Jones can’t remember what the diocese paid for the software, he says the fact that fees were assessed on a per-user basis made a difference in his final decision. Whereas the group started with a 100-user license, he has since upped it to 175 users. With such flexibility built in, he recommends Nemx tools for any church running its own in-house e-mail server.

As far as the heads of the diocesan finance department were concerned, the purchase was “easily justified,” he adds. “They had absolutely no problem with the price,” Jones recalls. “Of course, they were one of the groups getting the most spam.”

Today, Jones says the user who got the most junk mail — about 150 pieces per day — receives only two or three. “In fact, we’ve already renewed [Nemx] for this year,” Jones says. “We’ve been very pleased with it.”