Letting Others Deal with Our Spam

ArsTechnica.com is featuring a report done by web security firm MessageLabs that spam accounted for 81.5% of all the e-mails sent in June. Illinois was the most-spammed state, with 92.1% of all e-mails considered spam. Read entire article here… The MessageLabs report only measured the total amount of emails traveling on the internet, not the open rate by recipients or percentage that was blocked by anti-spam software or filters. What it does indicate is that Illinoisans are less protective in keeping their email addresses private, freely posting them on things like web pages and forums.

For several years Aslan hosted our client’s email as part of their hosting package and it seemed like everyone offered email with web hosting. Ours was a basic service and we got plenty of requests (ok, complains) for better features and spam handling. We did what we could with limited time and resources, but basically what our clients saw was what they got. It wasn’t until we upgraded all of our servers about a year ago and saw how little performance we actually gained did we realize how bad trying to manage our own email service was hurting us. The majority of the server resources were going toward processing email which as the MessageLabs report shows was spam.

At Aslan we’re web application developers, and managing email is a full time job that requires dedicated personnel and servers. We decided that we needed to offer a better email solution for both our clients and us. In researching many options we found that Google Gmail for Business fit our needs best. It gives our clients the power of company as big as Google managing their email for FREE! It’s easy to setup an account and configure it in such a way that the people you’re communicating with only see your company’s identity not Google’s. Any new client that needs email we setup on Gmail and we’re working to transferring all of our current clients over as well.

We’ll stick with our strengths and let those better equipped handle all the other stuff.

Tags: Aslan, Email, Spam

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.