It's the middle of the night and your server is humming along quietly protecting your business—or is it?

What you may not realize is that the e-mail relay is enabled on the server. And while you're sound asleep, spammers have activated software that seeks servers with open relays to do their dirty work for them. As a result, while you are sleeping, a spammer has snatched the opportunity through that open relay to use your server to send hundreds of thousands of spam e-mails under your company's name, protecting his own identity in the process.

And you may not know that this is going on until you discover that none of your e-mails are getting through to clients and vendors because your company now has been blacklisted as a spammer.

Spam is far more than annoying sales pitches. It can destroy your network and your company's reputation, resulting in lost business. So if you've only thought that spam was little more than lost productivity, you may be lulling yourself into losing your business.

According to CIO magazine, spam comprises half—that's half—of all corporate e-mail in 2003. Some estimates show that rate may increase to 60 percent by November.

If your e-mail address appears in a newsgroup posting, on a Web site, in a chat room or in an online service's membership directory, it also may find its way to spam lists, according to, "You've Got Spam: How to 'Can' Unwanted E-mail," a report by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Spam is unsolicited e-mail from a variety of sources, either known or unknown, that can clog servers and inbound mailboxes and contain attachments on everything from the annoying promotion to enhance body parts to destructive viruses that can shut down your network, according to Gregory Price, director of technology services for the Leading Edge accounting firm PKF Texas in Houston.

Spam comes to us in several ways, according to Alex Ziogas, director of technology consulting services for Leading Edge accounting firm KGN Financial Group in Chicago.

When we subscribe to something or purchase something online, we unwittingly have our name published on a mailing list sold to a marketing company. "Ninety percent of the time, you aren't given the choice about sharing your information. Often usage information is hidden in the user agreements that many of us disregard. Increasingly you have to go out of your way to say no, because the default answer is yes," Ziogas says.

Spam-crawling software harvests e-mail addresses from Web sites. If your company Web site contains e-mail addresses, this software finds and farms anything that says janedoe@abccompany.com. Recently companies have employed Web site development tools that block the crawlers, but humans still can harvest the information, according to Ziogas.

If you are a user on an ISP backbone, marketing companies can use software to track where you go on the Internet. This sophisticated software can create a database from your back-and-forth e-mails. Unless protected by encryption, outgoing e-mail is very telling, revealing where it's going, where it's coming from and what it's saying.

There are software providers who send e-mail to multiple name versions such as janex@abccompany.com, janey@abccompany.com and janez@abccompany.com, in a blanket attempt to find those few real addresses.

The caveat is that spammers harvest so many e-mails that they don't know if they're sending to a valid address—unless you let them know you're for real.

"You may get five to 10 junk e-mails for about a week. If you just delete them, they will likely stop," says Ziogas. "But if you open them or attempt to unsubscribe, then the spammers know they have a live person at the end of that e-mail address and will inundate you."

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