Study Finds Most Anti-Spam Efforts Yield Poor Results

A new user survey on anti-spam technologies conducted by Brockmann & Company ranked most systems to reduce unwanted e-mail poorly.

The study compared hardware-based appliances, challenge-response systems, filtering products hosted by third-parties and commercial filters. SpamButcher would probably be best described as the last.

The study did not evaluate user satisfaction of built-in Outlook antispam functionality or other novel techniques like grey-listing.

Roughly 1 in 5 users of commercial software filters reported being satisfied with the product they used. About 4 out of 10 users of hosted spam solutions said they were content.

Customers of the challenge response systems reported the highest satisfaction with about 2 out of 3 customers being happy with their choice.

I can speculate as someone who's frequently had to respond to challenge-response systems, that the people who send their users are often not happy at all. While proving you're a human can seem a valid way to minimize spam, there are issues inherent to the challenge-response approach.

The report also indicated that challenge-response systems were gaining penetration in corporate environments. Corporate environments have historically been prone to deploy traditional server-based filtering or install a hardware appliance to cope with excessive unwelcome messages.

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