Anti-spam measures fail business test

Most businesses are unhappy with the performance of their anti-spam technologies, a survey has found.

The survey, entitled The Spam Index Report, found that most customers were not fully satisfied with the service they received from anti-spam vendors.

More than 500 businesses were polled by IT consultants Brockmann & Company, with 40 per cent of the respondents having IT responsibilities.

Respondents found anti-spam services provided by ISPs to be the least effective of all solutions. Spam filters were found to be the next most ineffectual method of killing spam. Only 21 per cent of respondents were "very satisfied" with their user-trained PC email client spam filters. Open source and proprietary email client filters were almost equally ineffectual, according to the survey.

Spam-filtering appliances were found to be slightly more effective than software filters but the level of customer dissatisfaction remained similar for email client and appliance spam filters, at 78 and 73 per cent dissatisfied respectively.

Real-time black listing, a reputation-based system that collects feedback from users to manage a black list of known spammer IP addresses and domains, was also found to be dissatisfying for businesses, with only 24 per cent saying they were "very satisfied".

Hosted spam filters fared slightly better - but only marginally. Fifty-eight per cent of respondents still said they were not "very satisfied" with the service they received from hosted email-filtering providers.

The survey found that challenge-response anti-spam technology garnered the most business satisfaction, with 67 per cent of businesses proclaiming themselves "very satisfied" with it. Challenge-response involves first-time email senders being challenged with a reply email, requesting that the sender reply to that message, to assure the original email is delivered. According to the survey this is an effective anti-spam measure, as spammers seldom respond to the challenge email.

Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet UK