Hi, folks. I'm senior online editor at CIO.com, and I'm working on an article for which I'd very much like your help. There's often a lack of communication between techies and top company management. Maybe they don't want to hear about problems; perhaps you give them technical details that are far more granular than they want to know. But dealing with spam is a topic that every e-mail admin has to cope with -- and I'm not sure that the CIO knows the real issues. I have the ear of the boss, however. Essentially, I'm trying to put together the collected wisdom of e-mail and network admins in a fashion that CIOs will understand. Or at least one teeny corner of it. So I have a very simple question to pose to you: ***If you could get your CIO (or top management) to understand one thing, just ONE thing, about fighting spam, what would it be?*** And the follow-up: why did you pick that one item? Feel free to share anecdotes, horror stories, even success stories. While I hope that every CIO will read this article, I also hope that it becomes the document you bring to a new manager ("Here: this is what's important to me"). I'm sure there are plenty of other things that you wish your CIO grokked, whether about e-mail administration or other topics (not the least of which is "the e-mail admin is underpaid"). But I do have to limit myself somehow, and "what's important about fighting spam" has a lot of leeway. I'll be sure to stop by here (as I expect others want to participate in the conversation), but feel free to cc me with your response or send me a private message. I'm hoping for a rather fast turnaround on this article, so please blurt out your first thoughts rather than plan on writing a nice, leisurely response. If all goes well, I'd like to get this article posted in the next couple of weeks. Please be sure to let me know how to refer to you in the article; the usual format is &name, &title, &company and &location ("Esther Schindler is a senior developer at the Groovy Corporation in Scottsdale Arizona"). If you give me some kind of context I'm willing to work without one. That is, I do need some identifying characteristics to give the article credibility ("Esther works at a large finance company in the Southwest"). Esther Schindler senior online editor, CIO.com http://blogs.cio.com/blog/37