A survey on the users perception on the effectiveness of anti-spam products was carried out by Brockmann’s & Company. They surveyed 520 people working in IT, sales, marketing, finance, human resources and administration, or C-level executives.
The rate of customers who are not “very satisfied” is more than 70 percent for six of the eight types of anti-spam technologies. Commercial software filters, such as those produced by McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro, fully satisfy just 22 percent of users, the report found. Filters that come with email clients, like those from Apple, IBM Lotus and Microsoft, fully satisfy only 21 percent of customers.
Satisfaction rates are similarly low for business-class email hosting providers, filtering appliances, and reputation systems known as “real-time black lists” from Commtouch, IronPort and Spamhaus.
The worst-performing technology appears to come from open source projects like SpamPal and SpamAssassin, which fully satisfy just 16 percent of users.
The most-satisfied customers use challenge-response vendors, which fully satisfied users 67 percent of the time.
Challenge-response tools allow messages from known senders without interruption, since virtually all spam comes from first-time senders. First-time senders are challenged with a reply email telling them to reply, click on a URL, or visit a website to complete delivery of the message.
“This procedure overcomes the weakness of spammers since spammers never monitor the reply-to accounts of their messages,” the Brockmann report said.
Hosted email filtering services such as Google-Postini, AppRiver, and MXLogic performed second best, as customers report being very satisfied 42 percent of the time. These services use the processing power of Internet data centres to scour enormous quantities of email and find suspicious messages, Brockmann said.
People get an average of 11 spam messages per day, accounting for 15 percent of all messages, Brockmann said. That’s after the work done by spam filters. Before filtering, probably 90 percent of email is spam, they say.
Source: Techworld.com