The Hindu Business Line : A spam-cleaning perk?

WHERE there is IT, there must be a way! The way, however, is littered with many hurdles, often with a human face. To illustrate, here is the story of how IT could help, but it needed to first cross some human barriers.

This happened in a company, that would rather choose to remain unnamed, but for a brief description that it is in a certain line of service-providing. It has thousands of customers and is keen on receiving feedback from them. For this purpose, it has an e-mail ID that is publicised widely. "I have arranged that half-a-dozen of senior executives in my department are given access to the feedback ID, so that they could feel the pulse of the customer inputs," says Mr HoD (not his real name), who heads the customer support department.

"A good idea," I compliment him. "Your customers would have been happy that their complaints get such immediate attention." To this, he nods, "That's right, but there's a different problem. Spam." This was bound to happen, I tell him, because once the email ID is broadcast, it gets picked up by `ID harvesters' that are relied upon by the spammers.

He continues: "Daily, I watch sadly how my senior executives spend at least 90 minutes to clear their inboxes of unwanted mails about free degrees and potent pills, car loans and Nigerian money." A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that six people spending an hour-and-a half on cleaning up will work out to nine hours, almost equal to paying a staff full-time.

That's too much of an overhead, so I suggest the usual stuff, `firewall'. But he replies: "We did install a firewall, but there is a limit to what it can do. It scans each mail and cleans up viruses, appends a text file for reporting the cleanup, and sends the sanitised mail to the inbox, with harmless text lines such as, "You have no chance... ", "I have your password... ", "Please use the font Arial" and "Do you have asked me?"

If you have handled spam, you would agree that after about a few minutes of careful deleting of unwanted mail, your mind tends to become too fatigued to distinguish between a genuine mail and junk. "Everybody wakes up to search in the `deleted' folder only when a customer calls up to say he had sent a mail and there was no reply."

I nodded, because there are new spams all the time, making the life of firewalls and their administrators quite tough. I suggest, therefore, an alternative: "You must do the cleaning before copying the mail to everybody's inbox." I then go about helpfully elaborating the suggestion: "Let one person go through mails received at the customer feedback ID and delete spam; later, he or she can forward the cleaned up list of mails to another ID for use by the executives. Only, keep the second ID unadvertised, else you'd find spam there too.

"It is here that we are stuck," this hassled friend tells me. "Why?" I ask, puzzled. He continues: "I sent a request to the systems wing to let one of his engineers to help us out, but I am told that their time is too valuable for devoting to garbage clearing of swamped inboxes." He can't convey this comment to his team executives because they would be offended to know that their time is not seen as equally valuable!

"Try coaxing one of your executives to shoulder the responsibility," I suggest. "You can even think of rotating the job so everybody chips in with the mop, by turns." But he shakes his head: "You see, nobody wants to be designated as Manager (spam), or much less, a Junk Officer."

If IT would still have to work, I wonder if a `spam cleaning allowance' could be an appropriate answer. But such a proposal would meet stiff resistance from the accounts department, I'm sure.

ITworks@TheHindu.co.in

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