Is the cure worse than the disease?

Some UK IT experts are suggesting that methods to stop spam are responsible for millions of lost work hours annually.

To be exact - they're attempting to count up how much time is spent sifting through piles of diverted messages, to make sure no good ones got thrown out with the bath water. The fact that people feel the need to review these emails points to the well acknowledged fact that spam detectors screw up.

I'll fully admit - SpamButcher can misfile messages. I encourage anyone who is concerned about reliably receiving messages to review what the application has blocked on a daily basis. We specifically added the daily reports feature into the program to make this easy.

In my mind, this doesn't so much condemn efforts to deal with spam, but rather suggests that the solution needs to fit the problem.

Users who suffer little spam may be best of without any kind of email processing in place. Users with hefty spam problems have to weigh the cost of getting large numbers of spam against the risk of missing a message against the time spent sifting through a junk mail folder.

In the end, if tools to filter email weren't at least being perceived by end users to offer a benefit - they wouldn't be purchasing and using them in the first place.

Problems come about when a restrictive IT department or ISP decides on a single standard for everyone. Users which are the most frustrated by junk messages are the most vocal, and demand the most aggressive filtering. Users who miss email, are usually never aware it was sent in the first place - so they say nothing.

Back