We had a few people who were shellacked by spam backscatter today. My first reaction was to bring the GWIA(SMTP agent for non GroupWise admins) offline to stop the flood of bounce backs. This was my first extended experience with this happening to us. I wasn’t even sure what the problem would be called. Thoughts were racing through my head about an army of zombie machines pumping out spam from within our walls. I practically lost my cool, convincing myself I had no business being the email admin because I had no idea what the problem was called even after I figured out what was going on. Thankfully my boss found the correct terminology and that got me going to where I could tweak our spam filter rules.

Even still, I’ve found myself feeling like I have large gaps in my knowledge base and that I need some real training with some of the systems. There’s a lot to learn even about systems I have plenty of experience with.

Anyone having to admin an email system of any size knows the pain and irritation that spam can cause on a user base, and in turn, yourself.  We have been using Gwava for our spam filtering tool for years now.  It has never been perfect.  While the idea behind Gwava over competitors(beyond the GroupWise integration) is that it can be tailored to fit your organization as opposed to having to rely on 3rd party rule sets like what I think Barracuda and other appliances do.  The downside to that is that there’s a level of baby sitting that needs to be done to get it working.  The latest version(4) takes less manual labor than version 3.6.

I sometimes wonder if it’s worth the effort however.  I’m in a position where I’m a jack of all trades right now.  Today I spent time getting an analog phone worked into our VoIP system, tracking down a file locking issue with an ancient library application, and building an image for a laptop.  I don’t really have the time to babysit a spam filter.  Thankfully the good people at Gwava helped me out today to get our Gwava system back on the right track.  We were having an extreme false positive issue.  The filter was grabbing everything.  Under the probability scoring system, by default, anything about 99.9% probability is automatically deleted and not reported.  The scanner was tagging almost everything at 100% probability chucking mail into the void.  Great.

Hopefully the work we did today will be the long term fix.  At any rate, Gwava is a nice piece of software, assuming you have the time to learn it and work with it everyday.  I do not at the moment.