IT geeks: I think you’ll relate to this post. Everyone else: prepare to be bored.

One of the companies I do work for had a spam problem that was absolutely out of control. Several users were having to delete 200-300 messages each day, a few got infected by email-bourne viruses, and pretty much everyone was offended by the adult content found in most of the messages (I don’t blame ‘em!).

At the time, all the email filtering was done on the Exchange boxes themselves, which meant the servers were wasting all their processing power on filtering bad mail, and wasting all their disk space on quarantined messages.

I helped put a third-party filter in place so that all incoming mail hit an external company first, and that company would then deliver only the “clean” mail to our Exchange servers. Then we setup the filter so that users would get a daily digest of all spam caught - just in case some “good” mail accidentally got flagged as junk.

We soon heard that the geyser of spam was almost completely plugged for most users! So I thought people would be doing cartwheels in their cubes, singing praises to the IT department, and crying out their undying love for technology!

Instead, within a few weeks, I started receiving support tickets like these:

Hi IT,

Every day I get the spam digest email from our filtering company, telling me it’s caught several hundred spam messages and blocked them from being delivered to my inbox. Can I turn this daily message off? It’s really annoying to have to delete this message every day.

In a movie I’ll write some day, my character would’ve simply deleted the entire user’s email box, shut down their desktop computer, unplugged it from the wall, and thrown it out the window. Then I would’ve left a note on the user’s desk saying “Your spam problem is 100% under control. Ticket closed.”