From McAfee and Symantec to Apple and Microsoft, most vendors that make antispam products are failing to fully satisfy customers, according to survey released Tuesday by
the Brockmann & Company.
The best-performing technology by a large margin is made by challenge-response vendors like Sendio and SpamArrest, which challenge the identity of first-time senders, the report states.
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But customers rarely are fully satisfied by antispam filters packaged with e-mail clients, hosted e-mail or commercial antivirus
software. Too often, the products let spam messages through and mistakenly delete e-mail that’s not spam.
Thirty six percent of companies surveyed have lost business because of legitimate e-mails getting caught in spam filters, says report author Peter Brockmann, president and research
director.
“Whatever products they have developed obviously haven’t been working,” Brockmann says.
That’s bad news, as PDF spam seems poised to overtake image spam as the next big problem. “Now it looks like there’s going to be PDF spam, which is even
worse for businesspeople,” Brockmann says. “We sign purchase orders and pass contracts back and forth all the time.”
Rather than rate each vendor individually, Brockmann’s survey divides technologies into eight categories. The firm surveyed
520 business employees who work in IT, sales, marketing, finance, human resouces and administration, or are C-level executives.
The rate of customers who are not “very satisfied” is more than 70% for six of the eight types of antispam technologies. Commercial
software filters, such as those produced by McAfee, Symantec and TrendMicro, fully satisfy just 22% of users, the report found.
Filters that come with PC e-mail clients, like those from Apple, IBM Lotus and Microsoft, fully satisfy 21% of customers.
Satisfaction rates are similarly low for business-class e-mail hosting providers, filter appliances, and reputation-based
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% of users.
The most-satisfied customers use challenge-response vendors, which fully satisfied users 67% 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 e-mail telling them to reply, click on a URL, or visit a Web site
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 states.
Hosted e-mail filtering services such as Google-Postini, AppRiver, and MXLogic performed second best, as customers report being very satisfied 42% of the time. These services use the processing power
of Internet data centers to scour enormous quantities of e-mail and find suspicious messages, Brockmann says.
People get an average of 11 spam messages per day, accounting for 15% of all messages, Brockmann says. That’s after the work
done by antispam filters. Before filtering, probably 90% of e-mail is spam, he says.
Brockmann has also devised a spam index that lets users calculate a numeric score based on the amount of spam e-mails they
get, the number of trapped messages, minutes per day dealing with spam, and estimated number of resend requests. Challenge-response
vendors performed the best by a large margin under this measure as well, while business-class e-mail hosting service providers
did the worst.
