I originally posted this to a now defunct blog almost exactly three years ago:
Bill Gates made this bold pronouncement in January, 2004. So has the spam problem been licked?
I asked a few friends, all of whom are very computer-literate. Some use Macs, some use Windows, and some use both plus Linux. Just to be clear, I was asking my friends about this not out of curiosity alone. I’ve been working with Bob Cagle of Open Field Software [now CEO of productOps], producers of Ella for Spam Control to help make his website more attractive to potential customers. I wanted to gain some insights into the state of the spam problem as of December, 2005. Here are some of their responses:
A friend who works for an organization that provides IT services to nonprofit organizations writes:
[Our] spam filtering is fairly bad. A lot of mail that should
be rejected at the server level is passed on to clients. Maybe it’s
just me since I get a lot of spam. I think they have gotten better in
the past two years but they’re still not doing a great job of handling
it.
Personally my email host is doing a pretty good job of filtering spam.
I get a few alarming false positives, but with diligent application of
the whitelist I’m able to avoid that. I still have to review my spam
folder on a daily basis to avoid problems and there is a ton of mail
in there.
I feel like the only mail service I have used that has really
excellent spam filtering is GMail. Unfortunately I cannot yet use
GMail with a personal domain name.
I believe there are excellent anti-spam tools out there, but they are
not well understood by smaller organizations. I’m consistently
horrified by what people put up with as part of their daily routine in
some organizations. They think manually deleting massive amounts of
email filth is just a normal part of their daily existence and there’s
nothing they can do about it. Yikes.
This friend [Spence, also now with productOps] runs an elaborate digital design office out of his home:
Spam? What Spam?
I have spamassasin set to “balanced” on the server, greylisting enabled and virus checking enabled(server side). Here at the farm, I use Thunderbird’s spam filter.
I see virtually no spam at all,… now does that mean people are failing to connect with me? Possibly, but if they’re really interested, they can call me from my number on the website…
So,… Yes, I see MUCH LESS spam nowadays than I did even a year ago,… it would be nice if [Ella, a client-side spam filter] ran on Thunderbird too, I’d disable the iron gate on my server and see whats really getting blocked… I guess if I had a ton of time and interest, I could parse the (currently 20 megabyte) spam text file that gets deleted every month,… but I gotta learn CSS this week.
This friend works for a large organization:
I have three accounts monitored daily. The work account uses something called ASG and it catches at least 80% on any given day and probably 95% over a month. Some people who shop online a lot at work have more, I have heard, but the tool seems pretty good. I don’t know what my home ISP’s account uses, but I never get much. Having a small local ISP may help. Microsoft Outlook applies a second layer spam filter that is hilarious. Monday it calls the TicketMaster email a spam, Tuesday it lets it through. Spam filter, Now with the Alzhiemer’s Algorithm. Gmail, which is a well known address is, as [he] said, amazing. I have had a Gmail account for a ~ year and a half, never gotten a spam. Lotsa creepy ads in the sidebar, never a spam.
My experience with GMail has been different. I only use my GMail account for things like online purchasing, subscribing to some newsletters, and so on. Basically it’s a throw-away account. But I get an awful lot of spam in that account - on the order of 30 or so a day, about 10 of which get through. The Mail.app software on my Mac receives about 10 spam messages per day for three POP addresses and usually correctly identifies all of them. Sometimes, perhaps three or four times per week, a spam message makes it through.
So spam is much less of a hassle for some of us than it used to be. Then again, the sample audience I’ve been discussing this with consists of people who use computers to make a living. They’re not exactly a representative sample of the overall computer-using public.
Still, it’s fairly obvious that the Gatesian dream of eradicating spam hasn’t yet come to pass. There are solutions. Some people doubtless use Gmail with excellent results. Others rely on server-side filtering tools like Spam Assassin and don’t worry too much about false positives (messages that are flagged as spam even when they’re legitimate messages). Open Field Software’s client-side spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express makes a lot of Windows users happy, judging by the email Bob receives. I get great results with Apple Mail filtering.
As we turn the corner on 2005 and head into 2006, it seems there is no silver bullet, no system that has slain the spam menace. There are many different approaches to dealing with spam, ways to turn it into an only occasional nuisance. Curiously none of them are coming from Microsoft. To be fair, spam is a big problem. It’s likely too big for one entity to conquer, even if that entity is Microsoft. Still, the next time I hear someone from Microsoft make bold claims about eliminating spam, I won’t hold my breath.
Now that we’re approaching 2009, I don’t hear much about spam from most of my friends who work in the technology world. But I wonder if this is a representative sample, and whether there is still a lot of frustration out there about spam.
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