Fred Percynski This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Internet Week > Spam > Biopharmaceutical Company Finds Spam Filtering Is A Lot Of Work > May 2, 2003

   www.internetwk.com/webDev/show - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/8/2003   Last Visited: 5/8/2003

   "We had a large spam problem," said Athersys network administrator Fred Percynski. "Senior management especially was receiving a large amount of spam, and they asked us to implement an anti-spam package."
   
   The GFI software worked well at blocking spam, but Athersys -- like many other enterprises and individuals who filter spam -- found that it now had a new problem: false positives. Good e-mail was getting blocked by the spam filters.
   
   I talked to Percynski by phone after we ran last week's profile of CNA Insurance. ("How CNA Insurance Blocks Spam For Its 18,000 Users," Friday, April 25).
   ...
   Percynski contacted me to let me know that Athersys already has such a system in place.
   
   "We do end up blocking a lot of legitimate e-mail. Several high-profile users were rather upset that their mail was being blocked," Percynski said. The people with the biggest problem with blocked mail were e-mail power users -- the company's patent and intellectual property attorneys.
   
   Part of the problem may have been that Athersys installed the spam filters fast, without a lot of tuning. "Had we had some time to properly tune the software, maybe that wouldn't have been a problem," Percynski.
   
   Percynski said he finds the spam-blocking software requires almost constant tuning. The keyword filtering is very aggressive. For instance, e-mail can be blocked if it includes the words "toll free," or "sex" which are sometimes included in legitimate mail.
   
   The GFI software offered no way of allowing users to review blocked e-mail to check for false positives, so Percynski decided to build one. "This should have been built into the products by anti-spam vendors," he said.
   ...
   Percynski manually releases the messages himself.
   
   "If we had a large company, that would not scale really well," Percynski said.
   ...
   "This thing is going to save a lot of time and eliminate a lot of the aggravation that users find with the manual process," Percynski said.
   
   Athersys finds about 45 percent of its incoming e-mail is spam.
   
   While developers of anti-spam technology talk about the effectiveness of their products in terms of how much spam it catches as a percentage of overall e-mail traffic, Percynski uses a different metric: end-user satisfaction. And Percynski uses a decidedly low-tech approach to gauging end-user satisfaction: He listens to his fellow employees when they talk to him.

2. 2. Internet Week > Spam > Biopharmaceutical Company Finds Spam Filtering Is A Lot Of Work > May 2, 2003

   www.internetwk.com/story/showA - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/2/2003   Last Visited: 6/17/2003

   "We had a large spam problem," said Athersys network administrator Fred Percynski. "Senior management especially was receiving a large amount of spam, and they asked us to implement an anti-spam package."
   
   The GFI software worked well at blocking spam, but Athersys -- like many other enterprises and individuals who filter spam -- found that it now had a new problem: false positives. Good e-mail was getting blocked by the spam filters.
   
   I talked to Percynski by phone after we ran last week's profile of CNA Insurance. ("How CNA Insurance Blocks Spam For Its 18,000 Users," Friday, April 25).
   ...
   Percynski contacted me to let me know that Athersys already has such a system in place.
   
   "We do end up blocking a lot of legitimate e-mail. Several high-profile users were rather upset that their mail was being blocked," Percynski said. The people with the biggest problem with blocked mail were e-mail power users -- the company's patent and intellectual property attorneys.
   
   Part of the problem may have been that Athersys installed the spam filters fast, without a lot of tuning. "Had we had some time to properly tune the software, maybe that wouldn't have been a problem," Percynski.
   
   Percynski said he finds the spam-blocking software requires almost constant tuning. The keyword filtering is very aggressive. For instance, e-mail can be blocked if it includes the words "toll free," or "sex" which are sometimes included in legitimate mail.
   
   The GFI software offered no way of allowing users to review blocked e-mail to check for false positives, so Percynski decided to build one. "This should have been built into the products by anti-spam vendors," he said.
   ...
   Percynski manually releases the messages himself.
   
   "If we had a large company, that would not scale really well," Percynski said.
   ...
   "This thing is going to save a lot of time and eliminate a lot of the aggravation that users find with the manual process," Percynski said.
   
   Athersys finds about 45 percent of its incoming e-mail is spam.
   
   While developers of anti-spam technology talk about the effectiveness of their products in terms of how much spam it catches as a percentage of overall e-mail traffic, Percynski uses a different metric: end-user satisfaction. And Percynski uses a decidedly low-tech approach to gauging end-user satisfaction: He listens to his fellow employees when they talk to him.