How has spam affected your nonprofit?

In TechSoup's article Spam: Pigeon of the Internet, Michael Schrecker writes that not only is spam a nuisance, it can also introduce viruses and malware to your computer system.

How has spam affected your nonprofit? What are some of the measures you've taken to combat it? What has worked the best for you?

Share your spam stories here.

Spam has affected us in terms of time spent dealing with it. We have installed anti-spam, anti-spyware, and anti-virus programs. We use GFI's mailsecurity and mailEssentials for anti-virus and anti-spam respectively.

We have not been infected by any virus that I know of except one seemingly isolated incident. However, dealing with SPAM has taken much time to:

1. Purchase and configure software to deal with it
2. Educate the staff in Internet security issues

I have had to answer numerous questions dealing with spam such as, "What is this?" Another thing that takes quite a bit of time is dealing with SPAM that makes it into the Inbox or more problematic, legitimate emails that are flagged as spam by the system. Again, more education to help staff deal with these issues.

I think it is important that staff is educated on proper procedures for dealing with suspicious emails and even defining what suspicious is. I think education has truly made the difference, but it has required time and effort to do, which could have been used for something more productive.

Spam has not effected us a great deal. Users simply get the hang of pressing delete a great deal ;-)

I've been switching users to Mozilla Thunderbird (except for 2 Juno users who refuse to switch to a "company" E-mail address) which has a built-in spam filter.

Users have generally been smart enough not to open infected attachments, most of which get caught by the users' computer's anti-virus. Users generally dont install stuff (or do manual updates of software either, even when it was neccessary), so spyware has not been a huge problem, except for a spyware-laden app that one of the priests installed on a user's computer...

Our web hosting provider has generally been good enough to catch most spam at the server.

SPAM has affect us only slightly. We purchased GFI Mailessentials and use Symantec AV's built-in anti-spam filters. This helps some, especially helpful is GFI's integration with Exchange and Outlook. Users can easily add to a blacklist from within their Inbox. We restrict ActiveX and thrid-party plugins via Group Policy which helps cut down on walware. All in all, spam exists, will continue to exist, and we will keep smacking it away. Now if I could get decent printer drivers for Terminal Services . . .