Stuart Pinfold

Outsourcing Spam

It's something that I've never really had a problem with for my BBC email account, but I know loads of my colleagues who get a few dozen emails every day offering viagra, a chance to reactivate their online banking accounts or a 25% stake of a few hundred-million pounds from the son of a murdered sultan.

So, there was excitement when, last week, everyone got four emails (errr...) tellling us that we were going to get a new spam filter (Postini) 'within the next 30 minutes', that the new spam filter was now in operation, an emailed request to click to setup a password for the spam filter, and then another confirming that our password has been set. We've then been getting an email every day with a summary of our spam emails, with a link to a website where we can delete them altogether, or have them delivered to our mailbox if they're useful emails.

Which is all very well - except that, as soon as the changeover from Spam Manager (an in-house piece of software launched in mid-2004) to Postini happened, emails going to or coming from outside the organisation took 45 minutes to get anywhere.

So, this morning at 03:00, 'with permission and agreement from BBC Technology, Siemens and the BBC', we reverted back to Spam Manager, and - surprise, surprise, all is well again in the email world.

Of course, this wouldn't have anything to do with Spam Manager being developed in-house by a team of clever people before BBC Technology was sold off, vs Postini being bought off-the-shelf and trying to be installed on what is probably one of the biggest computer networks in the UK, with 21 buildings in London, 13 in Scotland, 5 in Ireland, 5 in Wales, 42 across England, and countless internet connections via journalists' laptops across the world. The standard Windows XP software has been customised for the use of the BBC to enable it to run special programmes and run customised scripts on logon. To get a connection at home, you have to obtain special permission as it costs a few hundred pounds (which now goes straight into Siemens' pockets) to buy the software which communicates with the BBC servers.

There are other departments in the line awaiting outsourcing, including BBC Resources. I'm now waiting for the day when the new company buy lots of updated, brand-spanking-new cameras for the television studios, and then realise they're incompatible with the studio galleries.

Who says outsourcing is good value-for-money?

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