Oh, those spam filters

Critics of aggressive spam filtering have long argued that losing or seriously delaying even one piece of important business e-mail - the dreaded false positive - is an unacceptable price for getting back the minutes we spend fumigating our in-boxes every day.

The equation for network executives, business managers, human resources directors and corporate lawyers can be more complicated, of course. But for the end user the issue boils down to this: You can't replace a minor annoyance with a major annoyance and call the change progress.

Buzz has bought this line of reasoning and as a result has cast a suspicious eye on the never-ending parade of vendors marching through here with filtering schemes. All claim to minimize false positives and some - the few, the proud, the full of it - claim to eliminate the risk altogether.

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Critics of aggressive spam filtering have long argued that losing or seriously delaying even one piece of important business e-mail - the dreaded false positive - is an unacceptable price for getting back the minutes we spend fumigating our in-boxes every day.

The equation for network executives, business managers, human resources directors and corporate lawyers can be more complicated, of course. But for the end user the issue boils down to this: You can't replace a minor annoyance with a major annoyance and call the change progress.

Buzz has bought this line of reasoning and as a result has cast a suspicious eye on the never-ending parade of vendors marching through here with filtering schemes. All claim to minimize false positives and some - the few, the proud, the full of it - claim to eliminate the risk altogether.

Yet there has been small comfort in taking a principled stand against spam filtering. The reason is that spam continues to get worse and more expensive to manage. We're talking a lot worse and a lot more expensive. So much worse and so much more expensive that even those who have in the past pooh-poohed complaints about the junk are now willing to acknowledge that it's far more than a minor annoyance.

Which led to my putting this question to executives from Group Technologies, a German company that's tried to make a splash in the U.S. with iQ.Suite, a set of e-mail security and management applications that includes a spam filter: Has spam gotten so unbearable that the specter of false positives is no longer the bogeyman - the deal breaker - for companies that might otherwise start filtering?

The Group Technologies executives couldn't agree with that proposition fast enough. Absolutely, positively on the mark, they said. Whatever reservations false positives had once created in the minds of network executives have been swamped by the sheer enormity of the spam wave.

I left the meeting not only believing that Group is indeed getting this type of feedback from customers, but wondering if it might be time for me to re-evaluate my own headstrong opposition to content filters. Maybe it's wise to give up that position and stake out a more moderate one that recognizes the old saw about desperate times requiring desperate measures. (Exhibit A: Our relatively small company received 1.5 million e-mail messages in April, of which roughly 85% were spam.)

Then Thursday happened. Thursday is the primary production day at Network World, meaning it's when most of the heavy lifting - and deadline sweating - is done by writers and editors charged with bringing you this publication. In this case, it was also the day after our IT department turned on a couple of advanced spam-filtering features to augment those already in place.

The result was not only a conspicuous drop in spam, but an alarming increase in the number of e-mail messages reported missing in action, a few of which fit quite comfortably into the category of mission-critical. The problem was too involved for what's left of this space, but rested primarily with a quarantine system that was filling with suspected spam and legitimate e-mail faster than hard-pressed human beings could sort between the two.