Have you ever wondered how much spam is floating around the Internet? The number may surprise you. Garrick Lau certainly knows the answer as he and his team work every day to ensure email deliverability for our resellers.

Garrick is our Manager of Security and Compliance. A good amount of his team’s efforts are spent on messaging abuse such as spam. While controlling spam might be a relatively straight-forward task for corporations, it is a completely different world for ISPs and web hosting companies. In this video, Garrick explains some of the challenges our resellers face, and how OpenSRS handles messaging abuse.

Garrick explains why software is not enough, and that collaboration with other ISPs is critical to ensuring email deliverability. Tucows is a member of Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) and Garrick explains how this plays an important part in establishing best practices, standards, and staying ahead of abuse trends. Garrick wraps up with some future emerging trends such as moving to a behavioral and historical based (reputation) model to track down spammers, and ends with an interesting example of a regular user vs. a spammer profile.

Its a big and increasing complex world of messaging abuse and a challenge to stay one step ahead. If you’re going it alone, or outsourcing, we’d really like to hear from you. What trends are you experiencing? What are your most common messaging abuse complaints?

This is part of a series of six videos called Inside OpenSRS that features some of the people who work to provide high-quality services for our resellers. Stay tuned as we share the other videos with you over the next few weeks.