Our first try seemed simple. If a user put unwanted mail into a folder named SPAM, an agent moved it to another database and created a list, applied at the corporate gateway, to block further mail coming from that address. I gave the information to a few users at my site.

People liked the results. While it wasn't perfect, it cut down on unwanted mail for everyone. Early tests had included only a couple hundred users and we were preparing to expand to more users when two things happened.

First, a message from a major vendor was accidently put in the SPAM folder. Now ALL mail from the vendor was blocked. It took a few days to identify the problem but only minutes to fix.

The second problem surfaced when information on the SPAM folder leaked out to the rest of the users at my site. Suddenly, the agent was picking up messages from more than two thousand mailfiles every night. Tens of thousands of individual addresses were being submitted for processing. Some nights the agent didn't complete while on others it failed to run at all.

The agent was re-written to delete messages from the SPAM folder, the list of blocked domains cleared out, and the problem rethought. A new method was proposed. The mail wouldn't be blocked or deleted at the gateway. Each mailfile would get a folder for SMTP mail and users would manage a list of addresses for SMTP messages they wanted to see in their Inbox.

We went back through live tests, giving the new agent to those people getting the most spam, based on complaints to the help desk. We watched the servers to make sure we didn't repeat earlier problems. And we gradually gave more people the agent.

In the midst of testing, Frank complained of getting thousands of spam messages every day. He was tired of wasting his time deleting all the junk and demanded the agent.

I didn't even look at Frank's mail as I opened his file in the Designer client and pasted in the agent. Then Jane, on the help desk, patiently walked Frank through the process of entering the SMTP addresses for messages he wanted delivered to his Inbox.

Frank called back the next day to complain again. He railed about the choice of mail system and the ineptitude of the computing department. Jane said Frank claimed to have over a thousand new spam messages in his Inbox despite the agent.

Since it seemed unlikely the agent had failed so miserably, I opened his mail in the Admin client. The agent was enabled. The list of addresses was in place and looked correct. I couldn't find a single spam message in the entire file. I asked Jane what he was looking at because there weren't a thousand messages in Frank's mailfile.