With ever increasing amounts of virus ridden spam targeting and attacking organisation's inboxes daily, email appears to be the perennial breach in the line of defence offered by corporate security policy. But does it have to be? Spam is a big problem with a potentially simple solution; if only the business community would wake up to this fact and collaborate. 

For some companies legitimate email now accounts for as little as 10% of all incoming mail. According to Gartner, organisations are reporting that 80-90% of external email is composed of unsolicited advertising or spam. In essence, spam is a colossal nuisance - not only can it be offensive, it is costing UK companies over £1.3 billion a year.

Unauthorised bulk email is draining our network resources, taking up to 50% of available bandwidth and depriving us of valuable working time when email has to be sorted manually. British companies need to recognise that spam is a growing problem that won't go away and start taking effective action now.

While filtering out spam keeps our desktops and corporate networks manageable, to really combat and eradicate spam we need a global agreement or framework to verify the source of every single piece of email and establish its legitimacy.

Having such a large percentage of email in circulation comprised of unsolicited messages takes up a lot of energy and bandwidth. We should be putting some of that effort and energy into getting to grips with the heart of the problem. In effect we need an open standard and some real co-operation from the major players in the industry, so that it doesn't take another 10 years to get an agreement.

Register email: eradicate spam

The most common reason for spamming is to advertise goods or services, usually pornography, unlicensed computer software, medical products, credit card accounts and fad products.

Unlike direct mail, where the major cost lies with the sender, spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. Most modern computers generally come with some ability to send spam and anyone can get a low cost internet connection, put an email server on the end and start sending bulk emails. And it's here, at the source of the problem - the rogue email server - that we need to put in controls, therefore lessening the need for tight controls at the receiving end.

What we need is a system of registering email servers - exactly as we register domain names, or set up SSL security certificates. No legitimate, professional organisation is going to object to registering their email servers, if it saves time, money and helps to eliminate unauthorised email.

We've built an entire trust model round shopping and using credit cards over the internet, so why not do the same for email, which has now become the most important and widely used method of business communication globally? If we adopted a certificate model of licensing email servers, then it would be easy to trace the origin of any unorthodox email and contact the owner of the server, and shut them down if necessary. In this way viruses and malware as well as spam could be instantly identified and eradicated at source.

Changing landscape

While laws pertaining to spam and the servers from which it originates are going to be put in place next year, there is a lot of uncertainty about who will be responsible for the policing of these policies. I think the big danger is that these are going to become statutes devoid of any real authority. Certification of all email servers will make owners responsible for the legitimate operation of any and all servers they maintain. Unscrupulous users will simply not be allowed to send email that doesn't conform to the rules.

Spam is big business, and unless action is taken soon, is going to continue to increase. While companies deal with it individually, the magnitude of the problem stays hidden. Businesses in the UK are losing £1.3 billion - that's equivalent to £374 per user each year.

If we take action now, the losers in the spam battle will be the more unsavoury businesses in our society; websites peddling illicit material, products and services. Even when response rates to spam are as low as 1 in 1,000 or even 1 in 10,000, the spammers are still making extraordinary amounts of money and that's what feeds the constant output.

It's about time that legitimate businesses started retaliating and refusing to accept the escalating costs of managing spam. Let's stop spam now, at the point of origin, and attempt to eradicate the rogue email servers which are the platform upon which all spammers are dependant.

The reality the IT industry faces is that the only way to do this is to licence and certify all our email servers through a trusted third party. Only then would we be in a position to open each email with impunity and consign any element of uncertainty to the recycle bin!