Hardware Based Anti-Spam for End-Users

Recently a company created the first hardware based anti-spam product intended for end-users. The product is called Spam Cube and retails for $150. There is no ongoing subscription for the basic email filtering, however anti-virus functionality is available for an annual fee.

Anti-Spam Hardware has been used to fight spam in corporate IT departments for some time. In large environments using dedicated hardware can make sense. The computing resources needed to process email for hundreds or even thousands of users can be substantial. Placing the software on the same computer as the email server can result in degraded performance.

For end users the benefits aren't as clear. Stopping spam for a single inbox is well within the capability of any desktop PC without impeding application performance. Users would still have to either configure the device, or reconfigure their email client to check for messages through the device. Placing the functionality on a dedicated piece of hardware seems to mostly be a gimmick, and a fairly expensive one at that. The fact that the company refers to their product as a "gadget" seems to confirm this.

Having blocked messages reside on a separate piece of hardware also brings up possible retrieval issues. The device presumably has some kind of web interface which may make recovery possible. However, most devices have limits on their storage which are more constraining than the near limitless space a hard disk offers. The time a user has to recover a message may be shorter than with traditional client-side spam blocking utilities.

One possible advantage would be if the email spam filters were placed on the same hardware device as the user's router or firewall. That way email could be monitored for unwanted messages without any configuration changes to software running on their PC.

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