Spam has become a major issue in our office for about a year and a half now.  In April 2006, we installed anti-spam software on our Exchange server in hopes to get the issue under control.  It worked for a little while but by fall we were dealing with spam again, and in higher volumes, too.

Fast-forward a few months to now.  The spam issue hasn’t increased, but it sure hasn’t gone away, either.  However, now that the planning/provisioning/execution of moving into the new building is done (or at least extremely close), I’ve finally been able to concentrate my efforts to different areas now that I’ve “found my rhythm,” so-to-speak.
Getting our spam under control wasn’t one of the top 4 goals we set for the IT Department, but it’s been on the table for months, so now it’s time to deal with it.  I’ve been reading other ChIT blogs and listening to the Church IT podcasts that Jason Powell has been recording and uploading (bravo, man… I need to sit in on one soon!) and I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Katharion.

Katharion is a hosted anti-spam and anti-virus solution that scans all your incoming mail (you need to update your MX records to send through their network, of course) before passing it on to your users.  There are quite a few options as far as mail handling and notification, and getting up and running is pretty simple.

I went ahead and signed up for the 30-day trial around 10:30 on Thursday night.  At 9:30 the next morning, I got an email from a Katharion rep.  They’ve got their systems set up for the trial and all I need to do is change my MX records.  Sweet!  I changed my MX records and soon after that I was on the phone with the same Katharion rep that emailed me earlier.  He gave me a guided tour through Katharion’s administrative interface and showed me how to add users and manage mail handling.

Within half an hour I had added our entire staff to the system.  Katharion supports LDAP and AD synchronization, but we have few enough people that I just nabbed everyone’s email addresses with an AD query and pasted them in.  While we were at it, I also had the Katharion rep add our old domain (sugarcreekfmc.org) as a sibling domain, so that all mail sent to that domain could be filtered as well.

We’ve been online with Katharion for just over 24 hours now and here are our stats:

 

Mind you, we’ve got our filter set to “Medium.”  I’m pretty wary about the 1165 messages that made it through the filter.  We only have 31 mailboxes (and a handful of aliases), so I would be very surprised if those were all legit emails.  I’ll probably check in with the top 6-7 spam recipients on Monday to see what’s in their mailboxes.  This week we will also tighten the firewall up to reject all SMTP traffic that doesn’t come from Katharion’s network.

I’ll check back in a few days with more stats on Katharion.  Hopefully this will be a good step forward in getting spam out of our users’ mailboxes.