UNC Email stats
Yes, the chart is correct; over 93% of the email directed at you at the University of North Carolina goes directly in the dumper. You never see it. And you should be glad.

Tim McGuire, Director of ITS Campus Infrastructure Services at UNC-Chapel Hill, has the sad job of marshaling resources and intelligence to protect you from “Evil Robots” (see my earlier article) by scanning every incoming email with “proprietary algorithms developed by the vendor to scan entire email content to determine if a particular message is a problem.” And that’s only the first step. Emulating Google, UNC uses Cisco’s SenderBase.org to try to separate Well-Meaning Robots from Evil Robots. I mean, you may have asked for that special Constant Contact sent offer for a sale at an outlet store you once stopped in for socks while driving up the interstate. But wait there is more. A total of 5 points for email “protection.”

Overall, Tim does a good job of briefly describing the efforts that an enterprise must go through to offer useable email services. That effort is complex, expensive, intrusive, highly reliant on outside resources, compute-intensive, and requires “continual reexamination of our effectiveness, constantly updated vendor algorithms, use of the latest reputation scores, and vigilance in stopping our own accounts from being compromised and endangering our reputation.” Yes, as needlessly complex as the sentence I just quoted.

There is another solution. Simpler and cheaper. Get out of the email business. And there is more to more social solutions as this new report from Forrester (on Tech Republic sponsored by IBM) on “The Business Value of Social Content” [pdf] contends.