Lotus Considers Client-Side Spam Control

IBM's Lotus Software Group is thinking about adding client-side spam filtering to its Notes client after the Domino/Notes 6 release later this year, said Diana Ermini, marketing manager for messaging solutions for the company.

Lotus, long an e-mail leader, has done little in terms of client-side spam filtering to date, although some partners understand why. Most of the tools now available for Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail are rudimentary, they say, and some integrators question their usefulness.

Also on Lotus' shortlist of potential post-Release 6 new features is message retraction, which would let the sender retrieve an e-mail message if it has not been opened by the recipient.

"I could have used that last week," joked David Via, vice president of business development for Wolcott Systems Group, a Fairlawn, Ohio, solution provider specializing in messaging.

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Microsoft has offered message retraction in Outlook and Exchange Server for some time, according to Exchange Product Manager Jim Bernardo.

Hotmail and Outlook let recipients block all future mail from a particular sender or from that sender's domain. The software routes those messages to a junk mail folder where it can be reviewed quickly and discarded.

But because a lot of spam emanates from Hotmail, AOL or MSN accounts, it is impractical to block all incoming messages from those domains. "And spammers never use the same address twice," Via said.

Mail administrators can set rules inside Outlook that will flag messages coming in that look like spam or possibly carry viruses. "Some of this is hard to automate out of the box, but in Outlook you can add an incoming e-mail to the junk sender list or to the adult content sender list . . . but then the senders change their addresses," Bernardo said.

In addition, the system can be set up so that if a message becomes irrelevant after a certain date, it will evaporate from the system, cleaning up inboxes around a company. "If I send out a message which will be irrelevant in five days, it'll self-immolate in five days," Bernardo said.

While Lotus may be bringing up the rear when it comes to client-side tools, its Domino server has offered stronger domain and address restrictions than its competitors for some time, according to Via. The only problem with these tools, he said, is that they are underutilized.

But no matter how automated the tools are, mail administrators and users have to be vigilant. One solution provider said it makes sense to let individual users set up their own blocks, but it would be helpful if all of them could be "rolled up and sent to the mail administrator" periodically for consolidation and to be applied from the server.

Spammers are a clever breed, often turning e-mail tools against those who wield them. For example, unsubscribe options sent with messages are actually used by spammers to confirm that the address is live and in use. Automatic reply messages saying the recipient is on vacation pose a similar problem, said David Ferris, research director at Ferris Research. Integrators should advise mail customers to be very careful about unsubscribing to messages that do not explicitly show the e-mail address in the "To:" field, Ferris said.

Microsoft's Bernardo concurs that this is a never-ending battle. "No matter which doors you close, people are finding new ones to open," he noted.