Study: Most antispam technology works poorly

McAfee, Symantec, Microsoft and most others seldom have fully satisfied customers

By Jon Brodkin, Network World
July 18, 2007 04:45 PM ET

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.

Related Content

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.

Click to see:

“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.