One of the important things about fighting spam, one that may not beimmediately obvious, is that there is no free lunch. Fighting spam cancost in the risk of false positives, or it can cost in people's time(sometimes you can spend money instead), but it always costs; youjust decide where you will pay the price.

(There are many ways that it can cost in people's time; for example,putting together and managing a spam filtering system. As illustratedhere,

I recently migrated a fairly important chunk of our mail service from anold mailer on an old server to a new mailer on a new server. It wasn'ta simple process, as it involved moving data from the old server to ourSAN, updating all sorts of configurations, changing scripts, and variousother things. But I managed to do it smoothly, with only one or twomoments of panic, and one of the big reasons for this is I made adetailed checklist .

Well before I started the

One of the perennial arguments between Mac people and Windows people iswhether or not Macs are better than Windows machines for staying safeon the Internet, and if they are, why this is so; not infrequently,the debates get quite heated. I think that one reason for this is thatpeople confuse the concepts of platform risk and platform (in)security,and thus miss something important:

Risk is not the same as insecurity.

(Here, a platform's risk is the likelihood that people using it will