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Sunday, April 17, 2005
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By Jim Pollock
Any spam among your e-mail today? Maybe a lot of it? Maybe so many useless and annoying pitches that you’re thinking it would be better to go back to the days of snail mail?
E-mail isn’t going to disappear any time soon, but it is possible to keep most of that spam out of your life, and about 2,000 computer users in Central Iowa rely on the services of Associated Computer Systems Ltd. to do just that.
“We got into this area about two years ago,” said ACS Vice President Tony Foth. “We’ve worked with LightEdge Solutions Inc. on spam, and we went together to Postini and worked out an agreement.” Postini Inc. is a California-based company that specializes in e-mail security and management.
Now ACS works on spam control with about 30 clients, most of which have 100 or fewer employees.
Eliminating spam requires more than the federal CAN-SPAM Act -- which went into effect Jan. 1, 2004 -- and keeping it out of your computer involves more than simply installing software. “Microsoft, for example, has a spam filter built in, but it takes a lot of maintenance to keep it current,” Foth said. “A small company struggles to keep up” as spam senders continually refine their messages to circumvent filters.
“Typically, when something gets filtered, the system administrator has to get involved and decide whether it’s spam,” Foth said. “The product we sell detects spam and stores it at a hosted site; the spam never comes down to your system, which saves bandwidth.”
Estimates of spam volume range up to 75 percent for some companies, according to various national surveys. One research firm recently said spam messages are increasing 1,000 percent a year.
Filtering out the unwanted e-mails is just one part of the problem; sometimes the filter’s algorithms weed out messages that are actually useful. “You can set the filter at a more or less aggressive level for each category of spam,” Foth said. For example, your company might require a maximum setting of 5 regarding sexually explicit material, but might allow you to lower it to 2 for mortgage rate offers, if such messages relate to your duties.
Ed Jensen is the founder, president and chief executive officer of Associated Computer Systems, a 28-person organization that just marked its 25th anniversary. It’s located at 11201 Aurora Ave. in Urbandale, with another office in Omaha.
The company partners with IBM Corp., and its various divisions deal with telephones, e-commerce issues, hardware and software sales, IBM training, disaster recovery and systems maintenance, among other areas.
On the subject of spam, Foth said, “We’ve coupled this with monthly desktop maintenance regarding ‘malware,’” a category that encompasses spam, viruses and spyware. “For a monthly fee, we make sure personal computers have all of the patches up to date and ensure that the virus and spyware definitions are up to date.”
The company has “hundreds” of customers for its services, said Foth, 34, who has a computer science degree from Iowa State University and joined the company nine years ago.
“We’re more of an infrastructure company” than a computer company, Foth said. “We try to streamline what’s out there and make things run better. We try to add value.”
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