Blocking Spam and Spyware

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into five parts to help you find what you need quickly.

Part I: Understanding the Problem

This part is about getting up to speed on what spam and spyware are all about, and what businesses are doing about them in general terms. You get a decent overview of what spammers and spyware writers are doing and how they affect your business. We take a look at the issues surrounding

* How spam and spyware impact business

* Why spam and spyware exist

* Choosing a filtering product

Part II: Justifying and Selecting Spam and Spyware Filters

Money doesn’t grow on trees, so in this part we talk about ways to help you sell the idea of installing spam and spyware filters to the folks who write the checks in your organization. To sell them the idea, you have to show them how much spam and spyware are really costing the organization. If you do the numbers, you find out that spyware and spam are costing your business a bundle, and we show you a few of the ways to calculate just how large of a bundle that is.

After you know how much spam and spyware are costing you, you can get a handle on how much you’re willing to spend to make the problem go away, so we also talk about how to figure out what filtering solutions will work best for you. A lot of options are available, and we cover all the interesting ones, with some of the pros and cons for each.

Part III: Deploying Your Chosen Solution

This is the meat and potatoes of IT: preparing your users for the new filters, installing them, and then supporting the installed solutions. In any IT project, you can fall into a lot of common traps, and we’ve fallen into most of them at one time or another. Although we don’t lift our shirts and show the scars, we tell you how to avoid those traps. In this part, we share a lot of good ways to prepare for the introduction of this new technology into your enterprise as well as some of the things that might seem like a good idea — until you’ve done it with real users or a real data center.

Although you don’t need to read this part in any particular order, we organized it in the order of how we expect things will happen for your rollout to users: training, followed by installation, followed by support.

Part IV: Maintaining Your Defenses

Almost anything that has more than one moving part will break down if not properly maintained. This is where we talk about how to keep the thousands of moving parts in your defenses working at peak efficiency, what sorts of fail¬ures you should expect, and how to cope with them.

No defense is perfect, and some of the constant beating that your filters see will cause you some headaches. We try to anticipate a lot of these, which should help you cut back on the aspirin.

Part V: The Part of Tens

Are you short on time? Do you need to know as much as possible about spam and spyware filtering in 20 minutes before your next meeting? This part is writ¬ten for just that sort of cramming. We talk here about ten filtering solutions, including some ASP solutions, some tips on getting your filter right the first time, and a list of the worst problems you’re likely to encounter.
Following the Part of Tens chapters are three appendixes. If you’re anxious to get started on your spam or spyware-blocking projects, you don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. In the appendixes, you find detailed lists of requirements and project plans — perennial favorites of medium- and big-company project managers.

In addition, you find a glossary of terms used in this book, so you can easily look up any jargon that’s unfamiliar to you. And to get hip to the lingo really fast, you might just read the glossary from A to Z sometime. (Discreetly, of course.)When you need to issue a command in Windows, we show a command like this: ToolsOOptions. In this example, click Tools from the menu bar at the top of the window, and then click Options, which appears in the list. If you don’t see Options in the list, you might need to click the down arrows at the bottom of the list of options to make all the options appear.

We wrote the chapters in this book separately but collaborated often because we live only about a mile apart. In this intro, we say “we,” but in the rest of the book, we say “I” because we’re nice guys and doing so made life easier on our editors (we never could be consistent). Seriously though, even though each of us took on the main responsibility for respective chapters, we worked closely together and often the experience or opinion in these pages is collective.

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