Networking For Dummies, 12th Edition

Chapter 21

Securing Your Email

IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing what spam is and why you should worry about it

Setting up software to catch spam

Tweaking your spam filters

Reducing the amount of spam you get

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam.

So goes the famous Monty Python sketch, in which a woman at a restaurant just wants to order something that doesn’t have spam in it.

That pretty much sums up the situations with most people’s inboxes these days. The legitimate emails get lost among the spam emails. Wouldn’t you like to look at an inbox that wasn’t filled with spam?

Nobody likes spam. You don’t like it, and your users don’t like it either. And believe me, they’ll let you know if they’re getting too much spam in their inboxes. They’ll hold you personally responsible for every email with an offensive subject line, every email that tries to sell them stuff they aren’t interested in, and every email that attempts to get them to provide their bank account password or credit card number.

As a network administrator, part of your job is protecting your users from spam. The holy grail ...