Many companies are starting to look at ways to either reduce or slow down the ever increasing spending on their messaging infrastructure. Not only has the amount of email traffic grown exponentially in recent years, new regulatory retention requirements for electronic communications are adding huge additional expense to IT operations and infrastructure budgets.

So how do you trim the fat? – Start looking for bacn bits.

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One of the few controls that mail administrators have at their disposal to curb the ever-increasing email volume traversing their networks is the maximum message size limit. Most companies deploy one size limit for their internal network and another for messages send to the Internet. At first glance, the reason for imposing size limits seems obvious enough. Who would want their mail server and network to come to a crawl or worse crash because a careless employee had sent a 600MB wmv file via email of junior taking his first steps. Naturally, most firms have put draconian restrictions in place, in many cases somewhere around 5-10MB for external and 10-20MB for internal messages.

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Black-hats and white-hats alike descended once again on Las Vegas last week for their annual DEFCON convention. The self-described “largest underground hacking event in the world” is a unique forum to get insight and information on the latest hacking trends, security vulnerabilities and exploits that may directly affect your business.

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The recent surge in Spam, specifically the Spammers use of pdf-attachments to thwart Bayesian Anti-Spam filters puts renewed emphasis on blacklists. Blacklists often referred to as DNSBL’s are in essence public databases of reported spammers IP addresses. Most mail servers and Anti-Spam solutions have built-in capabilities to query any number of these blacklists to filter out Spam.

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Michael Osterman of Osterman Research asks and answers this question on his blog.

“I believe the answer is no. In many ways, email is more database than communications tool, a repository of unstructured content that you can add to at will simply be sending me an email. If content is unwanted and unusable, such as spam, obviously it should be discarded. However, we all receive content in email that might not need a response right away, or that might be more useful when aggregated with other content.”

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A recent blog entry on the e-Discovery Team blog reminded me of this topic. The post talks about the dangers of exposing confidential metadata embedded in Office documents.

“For instance, a Word document containing secret comments they added, then hid, and then forgot to delete or “scrub” before production. “

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