Lethe's Ccielogs

Good morning all my readers, for once I’m not posting a technical article but I’m here just to write my thoughts.

During the past few days I’ve been really busy tuning a new Antispam solution we’ve introduced in my company which is entirely based on Open Source technologies (CentOS, Postfix and ASSP) and which is doing a superb job protecting both internal user’s mailboxes and external ones (as we also do some kind of hosting on our Exchange servers for a few customers). If you ever installed/managed an enterprise Antispam solution you’ll know for sure during the early days of life of the filtering engine you have to help them out to “learn” what is spam and what is not (we usually call it ham), if you did this you know this is the worst experience in an IT Pro’s life… If you never did this it works more or less like this, you open the Antispam console and you check every single, I mean literally, message that is being blocked by the software to make sure that message is really SPAM and not ham

Yes I’m doing this, everyday multiple times a day and all while I teach in class Sounds horrible eh? It is my friends trust me, anyhow this is the reason behind this post. No worries I’m not going to whine any more.

Well all know SPAM is a real hassle for every administrator, I’ve been administering mail server for a long long time and I thought I knew every kind of spam but during this days I’ve discovered a new type of spam… FACEBOOK SPAM! Yeah you read that correctly I wrote Facebook the famous social networking which seems to have taken over the world, people says this is the revolution of this year but I think it’s just another way to create even more unnecessary traffic on our poor systems.

Ok I’m not a fan of Facebook and can’t understand why someone would like to post  his/her pics on a public website, they say you can meet your old school mates but crap I don’t want to!, this apart I’ve noticed out of 100 incoming emails at least 70 came from Facebook! I mean that’s almost 70% of the total received email, that is a total waste of bandwidth, CPU power and TIME! My time and that of who’s receiving this kind of emails which is paid to do something else  than join the Mickey Mouse lovers group on Facebook.

What the hell is in that email? Every kind of amenity like “Foo1 has invited you to join his  new group “I love cheeseburgers” or “Foo2 has invited you to join his new group “I’m fed up with my job”. I mean is this serious?

They call it “revolution of the year” I just think it’s another unneeded service causing just tons of traffic on our mail systems and which, sometimes, cause the productivity of people to drop.

Please don’t be offended if you’re a Facebook fan but do yourself, and your mail admin, a favor don’t subscribe to every social network you come across with your work email address!