Most businesses are unhappy with the performance of their anti-spam technologies, a survey has found.
The survey, entitled The Spam Index Report, found that most customers were not fully satisfied with the service they received from anti-spam vendors.
Over 500 businesses were polled by IT consultants Brockmann & Company, with 40 percent of the respondents having IT responsibilities.
Respondents found anti-spam services provided by ISPs to be the least effective of all solutions. Spam filters were found to be the next most ineffectual method of killing spam. Only 21 percent of respondents were "very satisfied" with their user-trained PC email client spam filters. Open-source and proprietary email client filters were almost equally ineffectual, according to the survey.
Spam-filtering appliances were found to be slightly more effective than software filters, but the level of customer dissatisfaction remained similar for email client and appliance spam filters, at 78 and 73 percent dissatisfied respectively.
Real-time black listing, a reputation-based system that collects feedback from users to manage a black list of known spammer IP addresses and domains, was also found to be dissatisfying for businesses, with only 24 percent saying they were "very satisfied".
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Hosted spam filters fared slightly better — but only marginally. Fifty-eight percent of respondents still said they were not "very satisfied" with the service they received from hosted email-filtering providers.
The survey found that challenge-response anti-spam technology garnered the most business satisfaction, with 67 percent of businesses proclaiming themselves "very satisfied" with it. Challenge-response involves first-time email senders being challenged with a reply email, requesting that the sender reply to that message, to assure the original email is delivered. According to the survey this is an effective anti-spam measure, as spammers seldom respond to the challenge email.
Talkback
Challenge-response anti-spam technology
Challenge-response anti-spam technology must by now be one of the biggest sources of illegitimate email. It very successfully fills the " In Boxes " of those poor souls who have had their email addresses forged by spammers leaving them to deal with the SPAM problem
instead of the original recipient. A very selfish system altogether.
Why do system administrators not set up their anti-spam software to just blackhole suspected spam ? They might loose a few legitimate emails but at least they are not annoying other people and slowing down the email system with unnecessary traffic.
I suspect that a lot of system administrators do not know how to blackhole spam and are taking the easy way out by using commercial solutions thus wasting the financial resources of the companies using them.
SpamCop has an interesting article on the subject which all system administrators should read.
The URL for the SpamCop article is
http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html
Worth a read and might provoke a thought or two.
Justin Mason and I have debunked this study and we question Peter Brockmann's motives.
More at http://www.richijennings.com