Reader likes Yahoo e-mail for spam avoidance

I received the following from an IT professional who works for a Fortune 500 company. It’s illustrative of the spam problems faced by at least some users in large companies.

“I have split my e-mail accounts. My corporate account got so clogged with spam that I was forced to change the name from [name@company.com] to [name1@company.com]. Corporate IT decided that spam was not a serious enough problem to spend the money for spam filters.

“During the switch of my corporate account from one name to another, I routed all of my mail to my Yahoo account, and I have been so pleased with the spam controls Yahoo provides, I have left it as my primary mail account. I have access to it from anywhere without worrying about a VPN client and can always forward a document to my corporate account from my Yahoo account if I need to. If my Yahoo account starts clogging up with spam, Yahoo allows you to switch to other mail identities. I can check my third-party mail in a third of the time it takes to check my corporate mail, since I don’t have to fire up a VPN client and can use a browser. The corporate account is no more or less secure than Yahoo. I am much more likely to check a browser-based system without having to fire up the VPN client, etc.

“I don’t see affordable, effective spam elimination any time soon, and more and more of my colleagues are using an external mail system for some business messages, electronic magazines, etc. Sometimes you need the corporate identity on your e-mail address, but that really seems to be a magnet for spam lists. With spam solutions at $15 per seat… corporate IT sees better uses for the money. As long as we have e-mail, spam will be a problem we will struggle with.

“Two years ago, I said we would never outsource our mail, but I think if you did that survey again, the results might be different. E-mail consumes a lot of resources, and [the] corporate direction is to spend the money selling products.”

I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on this individual’s experience – please drop me a line at mailto:michael@ostermanresearch.com