E-mails: Clifford Chance takes new approach to management following receipt of 500,000 junk messages a day

City giant Clifford Chance (CC) has adopted a new approach to e-mail management as it continues to be bombarded with up to 500,000 spam or unsolicited junk e-mails every day.


The firm's original strategy to combat the problem - which has seen the rogue e-mails account for approximately 80% of all messages it receives - was to programme its mail servers to send automatic delivery failure messages to the senders of all messages identified as spam. Those sending genuine e-mails would then be made aware that their communication had not been received.



CC would also sift messages to look for 'false positives' - bona fide e-mails that had been mistakenly rejected as spam. However, after it installed the anti-spam filter software Brightmail, the firm saw the number of false positives fall to less than one in a million and decided it was no longer practical to continue this approach.


CC has now put the responsibility for ensuring that no client communications are lost onto fee-earners. In particular, fee-earners are encouraged to acknowledge receipt of e-mails, ensure clients realise the importance of following up on messages if they have not received a reply, and check that clients have received important e-mails.



Paul Greenwood, CC's director of knowledge and information, said: 'Most spam is not sent from the spammers' own e-mail addresses, so sending delivery failure messages was pointless. We were sending millions of messages to no one and becoming spammers ourselves.'


CC's change in tack comes as City firms continue to grapple with the issue, with one firm - Herbert Smith - reporting that an incredible 97.7% of the 18 million e-mails it receives each month are spam. A further 0.3% of messages received by Herbert Smith - which uses external mail security company MessageLabs - are viruses, meaning just 2% are genuine business communications.


At Allen & Overy, meanwhile, 47% of the 575,000 e-mails received each week are identified as spam by its outsourced anti-spam solution, Postini Perimeter Manager.


Peter Owen, IT director at Eversheds, said spam was a major problem for the national firm until it outsourced its e-mail management to an external solution company, Blackspider Technologies.


He said: 'Of the 2.7 million e-mails received monthly, two million were spam - before we used Blackspider some people were receiving 200 spam e-mails per day. Blackspider blocks known spam addresses and uses an algorithm to spot spam based on the use of words in the e-mail - 98% is filtered at present.'



Mr Owen commented: 'Spammers can buy a list of one million verified e-mail addresses for $1. If they have a connection, sending spam costs virtually nothing. This problem will not go away, it will continue to increase. We rely on our outsourced organisation to stay one step ahead of the spammers.'


Agreeing that spam 'remains a huge problem', Mr Greenwood said: 'We have the problem under control at the moment but the spammers are so creative that after six months I am sure they will have worked out a solution to get the mail through.'