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Study: Most antispam technology works poorly

McAfee, Symantec, Microsoft and most others seldom have fully satisfied customers
By Jon Brodkin , Network World , 07/18/2007
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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.

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.

Click to see:

Calculate your spam index:
Ever get the feeling you receive more spam than anyone else? Now you can find out for sure with a new calculation tool called the "spam index."

First, take the number of spam e-mails in your in-box each day and multiple by 20 (the result will be "A" in our calculation).
Then write down the number of minutes you spend dealing with spam each day and multiply this number by 20 (the result is B).
Now write down the approximate number of message-resend requests you received or made last month (this is C).
Finally, how many good messages were trapped by your spam filters last month? (This is D.)
Now, add A, B, C and D together, and you have your spam index. If it's above 360, you have a bigger-than-average spam problem. If it's above 500, your spam filter is a piece of $@&%.
Check out an automated version of the spam index.

“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.”

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I agree don's use this to compare products!By Anonymous on August 9, 2007, 11:39 amAfter using Ironport for over a year and seeing how much spam does get filtered. I think the writer of this article really needs to re-do his homework. Each...

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Barracuda?By dmwalsh568 on August 7, 2007, 6:27 amI find it fascinating that an article about antispam tech neglects to even mention the Barracuda filters.... We're using them and after the initial training it's...

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Don't use this to compare productsBy stk on July 20, 2007, 6:03 pmIndividual products will vary a lot even if they all use the same technology. And many use a mixture of technologies. And some companies, such as Abaca, use a...

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RE: Study: Most antispam technology works poorlyBy pjbrockmann on July 19, 2007, 6:30 amHi Jon: I've just added a Spam Index calculator so readers can calculate their own Spam Index and see how they compare to the 520 participants in this study. Check...

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