Vendors Fight Spam's Sudden Rise

Companies have been complaining about spam for years, and vendors have come up with different ways to fight the deluge of unsolicited e-mail. Antispam vendors, businesses, governments, and antispam organizations are taking steps to try to stem the rising flood of unsolicited e-mail. Antispam companies are beefing up their servers and research in an effort to better and more quickly recognize spam. Businesses are also increasingly using managed antispam services, in which a company's e-mail goes through a filtering server that is often in an antispam vendor's facility. Some companies are using dedicated antispam appliances - by vendors such as Barracuda, Cisco Systems, Secure Computing, and Symantec - rather than antispam applications running on a central server. The government has set up several enforcement agencies that work together to fight spam