Creating a spam free environment is a panacea; however the best approach of blocking spam may also be the most annoying to the end users affected by it.

A number of anti spam vendors use several levels of protection, on the ISP, the network edge, the mail server(s) and on the users machines themselves, normally in the form of a plug in to the mail reader, other vendors promise to drop spam by 99% or more. This seems tantalizing, depending on the number of spam items received and the number of false positives. Outsourcing the spam burden may work, however the end user is still involved in filtering out false positives and retrieving that "missing mail" which was blocked by mistake.

As burdensome as it may appear to the end user, keeping the end user community involved AND educated to the company's spam policies, as well as having ultimate buy in to help train spam/ham based spam products, ultimately shortens the response time to spam attacks.

All-in-one antivirus clients are massively popular in this regard, offering personal firewalling, spyware, malware and spam protection. However this may be putting all of your eggs into one basket. Using multi faceted AV to duplicate layers of protection works well when an internal threat exists from worms or malware. Adding spam protection to this layer makes sense as well, since networks with layers of overlapping security tend to be hardened to multifaceted attacks, as well as disasters and outages.

Networks which are large enough, should then not only think of several layers of protection for incoming and outgoing traffic, but strongly consider adding real time routing virus walls between network segments and V-LANS to bolster network security and guard against outages.

One of the requests most heard in corporate boardrooms regarding spam, is to make the problem go away, however in the long run, spam is a problem that at best may be managed, but not escaped. Spam borne malware and malware which spasm have both shifted the problem from content filtering only to requiring several type and layers of protection.

Nicolas Blank is a Microsoft Infrastructure Architect and consultant, and specializes in Exchange, Active Directory, architecture, systems management, migration and scripting. Nicolas is a Microsoft MVP for Exchange and spends what spare time he has writing, blogging and talking about Exchange and associated technologies.