outlook express spam filter

I can’t open my e-mail inbox these days without being greeted by some racy subject lines peddling manhood enhancement programmes, manhood assistance drugs, promises of millions of US dollars to be transferred to my bank account from some persecuted high-ranking government official from a Third World country, promises of ready and willing college-going girls who would perform unmentionable acts via a Web cam, and news that I’ve become the winner of some lottery I never knew existed—now please send them a cheque. And that is with a spam filter in place. I can’t imagine what my inbox would look like without one, and I wonder if I could possibly get through a day’s worth of junk mail without going insane. Spam is a modern-day scourge, a blight on the face of the corporate landscape, and a disease we cannot hope to eradicate without resorting to brute force. While tackling spam has become our daily (and time-consuming) ritual, we found some spare time to be productive with our e-mail—and collaborated with Ferris Research, a US-based market and technology research firm specialising in messaging and collaboration, to investigate anti-spam technology used by Asian companies. Run by David Ferris and his merry team of 18 employees spread between San Francisco and London, the firm has worked with our sister publications in the US to conduct similar research on topics related to security and messaging. Messaging managers and IT staff responsible for running anti-spam systems in their organisations completed the survey, and Ferris Research posed a subset of the questions to those who identified themselves as end-users of anti-spam systems. The focus was kept on organisations in Asia-Pacific, most of which were in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. While the anti-spam survey responses are undergoing intense scrutiny, (a big “thank you” to those who persevered through the questionnaire—hope you won that Apple Shuffle), the hard part has just begun: making sense of raw data. The team at Ferris Research will be making available the finished report exclusively to Network Computing Asia, and we hope to publish it as a feature story soon. Meanwhile, they have graciously consented to an early peek at very preliminary observations: 1. Anti-spam share by number of mailboxes: Trend Micro dominates this market, but is weaker in the small enterprise sector, which is led by Symantec and McAfee. 2. Trend Micro’s strength is clearly in large-to-medium organisations. Larger organisations are more comfortable with running the open source code, SpamAssassin. While this is a respected way to filter spam, it is usually harder to manage and to keep updated than many commercial products. (Note that many commercial products have SpamAssassin or elements of it at their core. Some vendors freely admit to this, others treat it as a “dirty little secret.”) 3. Overall Satisfaction/Reputation: When asked for their overall satisfaction, Sophos users were happiest, followed by users of Tumbleweed, McAfee, and Trend Micro. Users relying on Microsoft Outlook to filter their spam were least satisfied. 4. The vast majority of users experience no more than one false positive per day. 5. A typical false negative rate is five per day (i.e. a typical user has to manually delete five spam messages per day that were missed by the filter). 6. The larger the organisation, the more accurate the spam filter seems to be. 7. The most important customer criteria are: spam catch rate, vendor update speed and update quality. With that to whet your appetite, I hope it has given you a taste of what’s to come, and that you’re reasonably enthused by this. I understand that the analysts at Ferris Research are grappling with over 90 charts and tables (and counting), and valiantly coping with the unenviable task of cross-tabulation and so on. I wish them luck. As stated earlier, the above findings are preliminary, and Ferris’ final observations will hopefully delve deeper into what has been outlined. We’ll just have to be patient and wait. In the meantime, kindly excuse me while I return to my daily ritual: deleting spam.