Anti-Spam Products Give Unsatisfactory Performance

People in general are unhappy with the services of their anti-spam vendors; such was the finding of a recent survey carried out by Brockmann & Company.

The research study entitled, "Spam Index Report - Comparing Real World Performance of anti-spam Technologies", assessed filtering products, servers and blacklist services with the help of Spam Index. This Index is a new way to measure the anti-spam performance on the basis of real-world experiences of users.

The survey found that customers were not fully satisfied with the anti-spam products of most vendors from Symantec and McAfee to Microsoft and Apple. They were not happy with the anti-spam filters that came along with e-mail clients, hosted e-mail or anti-virus software carrying a commercial tag. Very often these products allow spam messages to pass through and even erase legitimate e-mails wrongly recognizing them as spam.

E-mail is considered as the most acceptable communications service, which has come to affect employees' work performance in almost all industries and in all jobs. Therefore, when e-mail bulk consists of spam messages, they harm user productivity by delivering too much anonymous, inappropriate and irrelevant e-mail.

A lot many companies (about 36%) have suffered business losses when inbound legitimate e-mails got blocked in filters separating spam. Those vendors' anti-spam products obviously have been functioning incompetently, according to report author Peter Brockman who is also president and research director of his company. CIO published this in news on July 20, 2007.

Respondents in the survey gave a negative opinion of ISPs as well because they found their solutions ineffective in many respects. The next most ineffective tools they said were spam filters designed to kill spam.

According to Brockman, on average people receive 11 spam mails per day that account for 15% of total e-mail. Further, this is after the spam filters have done their work. Prior to filtering, spam could be 90% of all e-mail.

Instead of rating each vendor separately, Brockmann grouped technologies into eight classifications. The survey questioned 520 company employees who are engaged in IT, marketing, sales, finance, administration and human resources, or are third-level executives.

Related article: Anti-Spam Laws may not Solve the Problem

» SPAMfighter News - 7/31/2007