A recent survey asking IT staff to rank issues relating to email suggests that spam and management are still causing difficulties.

The annual research by email security specialist IronPort questioned 300 IT managers and found that availability of email systems was the top concern for third year running. Spam, viruses and management took the next three places. Legal compliance fell to seventh place from second last year.

IronPort technical consultant Jason Steer said the results suggest most IT directors now have systems in place to deal with compliance issues, but the management of enterprise email systems is still a challenge.

"A lot of people are talking about the rise in spam, especially image spam, which is causing a lot of anti-spam vendors pain," Steer added. "The problem was fixed in 2004/5 but the spammers are finding ways to beat the radars – because their techniques change so fast the vendors can't keep up."

Steer said many firms are now using email authentication systems such as Microsoft's Sender ID and Yahoo's Domain Keys to tackle the problem, and such tools had tripled in deployments at Fortune 500 companies since last year’s survey. "It's [no longer just] a nice-to-have – if you want to send volumes of email and you're a large corporation or a managed service provider you need to [consider such tools]."