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GigaOM » Spam is sucking life out of Email

Posted by Arif on Thursday, 12/07/06

We all know that spam's a problem. But a recent post on gigaom.com had a stat that caught my eye: quoting a NY times article that said spam "accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages."

I knew that it was bad, but since we've set up with Mailfoundry, the number of spam messages that actually make it to my inbox have dropped to fewer than 10 a week - yes, a week.

I'm not suggesting that Mailfoundry is the answer to spam filtering - running mail through Gmail, using SpamAssassin, and any of the many other tools out there are probably equally good.

What I do think is that as the number of spam increase relative to actual mail, we're going to see three things happen:

  1. spam filtering that happens away from your inbox is going to increase in popularity due to its greater efficiency for the end user (you).
  2. spam filtering that aggregates the spam reporting of its userbase is going to become ever more effective - think about something like Gmail or Mailfoundry, where many users are marking messages as spam thereby training the filters for everyone. It just makes sense that this sort of approach is going to always be more effective than what you or I can do invididually by training our own anti-spam system.
  3. some form of verified sender and "pay to send" email is going to arise out of the competing proposals. Making spam unprofitable is the only realistic way I can see to shift this trend. The concept has problems, but spammers are spamming to make money. A serious reduction in the profits would go a long way towards reducing the allure of spamming.

The trick is going to be coming up with a solution that retains the utility of email while signifcantly reducing the spam problem in a manner that doesn't restrict control of who can send email.

Filed under Email, Internet, Web

Comments

We got in the MailFoundry 1150 server and turned it on last Tuesday and do agree with your three prong attack on Spam mentioned above. MailFoundry is stopping 500+ spam messages a day from ever getting to our Exchange server which is a good thing. It is set to kill all emails containing a virus and then sent a notice to us of its action. It is currently passing about 20-25% of emails hitting the MailFoundry server. While my Inbox is much cleaner my Junk E-mail folder is still catching about 200 emails a day which is already about a 25% decrease but we have just started a few days ago training by returning the spam back to the home office of MailFoundry so they can better train the filters they update our box with every 5 minutes each day. The MailFoundry software interface is wonderful and customer support seems to catch the phones live and the one email that I sent as CEO at 11 PM just to test their response time was answered at 7:14 AM the next morning and their support hours are 7 AM to 7 PM CST. That was a 14 minute response time for the opening bell. My email address is about 8 years old and posted in forums all over the web as well as on our company website is one reason I get like 500 mails per day. MailFoundry is stopping about 200 a day for me and with the Exchange Junk E-mail folder catching about 200 messages a day my Inbox is relative clean so I can get straight to work and deal with the Junk E-mail folder outside of peak hours because it does produce some false positives but that is not the case with MailFoundry after nearly a week. MailFoundry has not produced the first false positive that we have caught and our IT Manager is looking VERY hard. :) As you stated solutions like MailFoundry is just one part of the solutions to making spam more manageable. The man-hour savings and productivity increase is already being seen over the past several days and IT loves it. ASSP that we had helped a lot but was crude to work with and training was time consuming. The staff at MailFoundry are doing a lot of the work for us that we had to do with ASSP. While ASSP was free we are going to see our bottom line improve more with MailFoundry so free is not always free.
Submitted by Gale Hawkins (not verified) on Saturday, 12/09/2006 - 2:49pm
I've been really stuck on the way to make bonded user accounts in drupal, which is comparable to pay-to-send email. NOSI gets zillions of new user registrations, most of them total horse puckey. I'm just not convinced that asduoauetwdsfaewatyahoo [dot] com is a real person. Not when their professed interest in NOSI is asdfwioetnhae. If we could charge a dollar for every user registration, we'd have the makings for super low threshhold membership structure and I think that the trolls would quit swarming. Same thing for my blog, I get about a new user a month, but as far as I can tell they are all bogus spambots. I've also been tempted to look more closely at http://akismet.com/ which seems to be a total godsend for WordPress Blogs. Meanwhile, Mayfirst/People Link has some great writing on spam from an organizing perspective.
Submitted by amanda (not verified) on Thursday, 12/14/2006 - 10:54am
Akismet is a total godsend. Looking at my wordpress akismet stats, it has blocked 2848 comments in the last 15 days, 21,666 since installing it. It works really well. I still some spam comments, but far far fewer than before.
Submitted by Arif (not verified) on Thursday, 12/14/2006 - 12:18pm
Mailfoundry continues to improve our productivity at HRI. The lack of false positives has been a huge surprise to me because I had assumed testimonials posted on their site were exceptions to the norm. We implemented Mailfoundry on 5 Dec 06 and have yet to find one business email to be a false positive. We had one employee who sent a batch for photos from her personal home email account to another employee’s work email account and Mailfoundry labeled it as spam so we are still at ZERO false positive as far as we are concerned after 12 days of Mailfoundry going online. The 250 spam messages a day that were getting to Exchange and landing in my Junk E-mail folder are down to 150 a day after about 10 days of training which is a breeze with the Mailfoundry toolbar for Outlook that you can download from their site. Below is a full history report from Mailfoundry. The viruses are killed at the box and do not even arrive to our Exchange server. I am sure Exchange would thank us if it could talk for reducing its total work load by 90%. Mailboxes - 33 Total Messages - 18,483 Allowed Messages - 1,900 Allowed % - 10,29% Blocked Messages - 16,583 Blocked % - 89.72% Our free trial period is about up so we are trying to decide to keep it or return in before our credit card is processed. :)
Submitted by Gale Hawkins (not verified) on Saturday, 12/16/2006 - 4:39pm

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