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Ask Slashdot: Why Are Major Companies Exiting the Spam Filtering Business? (slashdot.org)
broswell writes: For years we used Postini for spam filtering. Google bought Postini in 2007, operated it for 5 years and then began shutting it down. Then we moved to MX Logic. McAfee bought MX Logic, and McAfee was purchased by Intel. Now Intel is shutting down the service. Neither company chose to raise prices, or spin off the division. Anyone want to speculate on the reasons?
Maybe it's not profitable?
Because Gmail does a better job anyway, and outlook is for old people.
It has been impossible to meet the expectation of the customers about being 100% effective and the pricing has become commodity. Add to that, Microsoft is throwing in basic capabilities free in Office 365 and it becomes like try to sell ice to Eskimos.
Guessing Google integrated the parts of Postini they wanted into Gmail's spam filtering and has no desire to help improve other email providers spam filtering.
McAfee recommends migrating from MXLogic to Proofpoint -- an exclusive partner. In this pdf they call it a more feature rich product. And I'd guess they are getting some sort of financial incentive to recommend Proofpoint. http://www.mcafee.com/resources/faqs/faq-eol-email-security.pdf
Google had no need for Postini. Google's own spam filtering in Gmail is pretty good. Probably as best as spam filtering could be, under the circumstances. So that's one elephant in the room.
The other elephant in the room is Microsoft, with Hotmail, or Office 365, or whatever it's called these days. I don't have any firsthand exposure to that service, but from what I hear its built-in spam filtering is also fairly good.
Big email providers like that have no need to use an external, third party spam filtering service, since they have the technology, and the scale, to implement it in house. Organizations that outsource their email service to these elephants get spam filtering as part of their service and, again, have little need for a third party service.
About the only likely market for third party spam filtering services would be small to mid-range ISPs or organizations that want to run their E-mail in house. They wouldn't typically have the in-house technology to implement spam filtering, and would rely on a third party. Seems like a fairly small market to me, and with E-mail generally on a slow, steady decline there doesn't seem to be a lot of market opportunities here, for third party spam filtering services.
Far too many people in this world dedicate themselves to profit rather than what would serve their fellow human beings the best. Never will understand why though. As a species, human kind has depended on the help of others to advance.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Modern appers now use slack, not LUDDITE EMAIL. It is disruptive.
Because pretty much everyone uses gmail, yahoo, Office365 or some other mail service which already does spam filtering. The only person in recent history that I know of running a private e-mail server was Hillary Clinton and see how much good it did her...
Why? Because the Oracle has spoken.
The vast majority of users don't give a damn about security. Their only concern is about what is happening to Aunt J who lives a couple thousands of miles away. She might leave them a hundred gazillion dollars to the most doting offspring after all. So curious here, what is the price of privacy?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
At the top end, the big tech companies like Google or Microsoft have their own spam-filtering systems in-house. At the bottom, individuals and entities too small to run their own mail servers either depend on Bayesian filtering in their e-mail clients or get email from one of the big tech companies. And in the middle, they either outsource their email to one of the big tech companies or can put together their own spam-filtering solution readily enough using available tools like SpamAssassin that're mostly open-source. End result: there's no market for spam filtering except as part of a complete email provider business on the scale of Google or Microsoft.
I think Spamhaus has taken this market and anyone else will have a hard time competing and still be profitable to make it worth while.
Easy
It isn't profitable. It's enormously expensive to pay so many employees to read EACH AND EVERY email to determine if it's spam.
There's no other explanation that explains why spam is still such a problem. Email has been almost useless for fifteen years, and it killed off Usenet discussions at about the same time. If corporations were serious about stopping spam, the problem wouldn't have simply gotten worse.
Malware is the new Spyware. Trends move with the times. Also pissing in the wind comes to mind. Every man and his dog has a solution. No profit in it.
I run a private email server on a hosted VM with Spam Assassin for me and my family. It's secure, private, and inexpensive. The biggest cost a a few minutes every couple months to keep it patched. Well worth it. My friends with gmail and yahoo addresses keep getting spammed, slammed, and pwned, but can't be bothered.
COE
In the past, spam was mass-flung with no real power. Filtering it was a relatively easy task, with an acceptable false positive rate and an even more acceptable false negative rate.
Today, while those spams still exist, between e-mail client junk folders and greylisting, the mass-flung spam is little more than an annoyance -- it doesn't have any real negative effect in term of dollars. Virus scanners catch those attachments pretty well too.
But now we have spear phishing -- real-world big-business, hand-crafted, artisan spamming. No spam filter is ever able to catch any of those. And they do real damage creating real monetary losses for big and small business alike.
So if your spam filtering business can catch the easy ones that do no real damage, and can't catch the hard ones that do the real big damage, then who's your paying market?
Hosts files don't stop spammers from instantly creating a new site using a stolen credit card number, sending their payload by e-mail or onto forums (e.g. APK posting his garbage on Slashdot), and watching the many people who aren't already familiar with email spam visit their website.
Also, why is your Hosts Engine a scary executable blob rather than being open source?
The time to have put a stop to spam email was long before Arpanet was even invented, let alone the Internet, or the Internet being opened up for access by the general public. The time to stop spam was way way back when the first bulk advertising mail to 'Resident' first occurred. If the U.S. Postal Service had said 'Hell, no!' to bulk mail, back in the day, we probably wouldn't have spam email now. As the situation stands right now, it's more or less impossible to stop, I'm sorry to say, and as such it's no mystery to me that any company that offers an anti-spam service would think twice about continuing to offer that service. Trying to herd ferrets on Adderall would be easier at this point than trying to stop the tsunami that is spam.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
We have a human
I bow to you sir, and thank you!
On the commercial side, there is Barracuda. On the free side, there is Spamassasin. That doesn't leave much room for others.
https://www.roaringpenguin.com... they provide and support CANIT PRO, which is basically mimedefang and spamassassin on a debian base, with dynamically updated blacklists and filtering rules. It works really well. David is one of the guys behind behind mimedefang, so you are also helping open source by going with these guys. The pricing for us was really decent.
They usually work with appliances, but we managed to use our own configuration to do some sweet stuff: we put the mail filtering cluster in the DMZ, along with the DB. but we put the customization interface is on an internal network. That way there is no firewall exception for the DMZ (ok except SMTP... can't avoid that one.) and the DMZ gateway doesn't need access to internal credentials at all (Active Directory in our case) It just knows that the interface machine on the inside is trustworthy. Even though the DB has no access to authentication services, the users can still customize their filtering to their desire.
I think for big companies, one concern is that I have never heard anyone rave about spam filtering. In terms of brand-awareness it is a completely one way street, Either people are satisfied with it, in which case they shrug, or they get irrationally violently abusive of the service, and have un-realistic expectations. It is a risk for any major brand to operate spam filtering, with literally no upside (ok, aside form revenue, but if it is a small part of a business, the reputation risk might outweigh the revenues.) Touching people's email brings out all the consipacy buffs you can imagine, and for some small but vociferous group they always have their own solution, and whatever the email admin does is crap. That's a thing that was great about Roaring Penguin's CanIT PRO when we rolled it out, it gave each user the ability to turn off the filtering entirely, if that's what they wanted.
It worked like a charm. Whenever we got some idiot (the truth hurts!) who thought they could do better, we just said fine, here is how to turn it off. Out of 6000 boxes, we had about 200 opt-out right away, most of them turned it back on within a few days, after a year it was down to 60 or so, and then when there were some malware infection episodes, it came out that their 'custom' solutions were not actually working that well, and everyone came back into the fold. Being able to let people opt-out saved us literally months of pointless arguments while letting us deploy good service for the co-operative many.
This was for about 7000 mailboxes, which is small as far as mail installations go these days. The real clients for this stuff is hosting providers and outsourcing companies (cloud based) I think the reason for large companies exiting the business is the huge trend of small companies to cloud, there just isn't much of a market for small email installs anymore... People are using huge hosted configurations. It's gradually getting dismantled now because of some organization move to a single outsourced solution with many hundreds of thousands of mailboxes...
The anti-spam market is small, mature and shrinking as more and more companies outsource their email to Microsoft or Google. While it can be profitable, the actual numbers are way too small to interest behemoths like Intel or Google.
I happen to run a small anti-spam company. We're doing extremely well, but that's because we have low overhead and can survive quite nicely on the little slice of market share we have. But I have no illusions that my company will be the next Facebook or Google or whatever... we'll chug along steadily for as long as we want to, and we'll make a very nice living at it, but that's about it.
put your mail server on a aaaa record only and you will see so little spam that you can filter it manually.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! (I'm from Roaring Penguin and am the MIMEDefang gal). But actually I go by DIanne now.
I had no idea! It shows how long it has been since we needed to talk! Thanks for the great product, Dianne !
Can't answer any questions about why the spam filtering services you mention are being discontinued, but the providers I work with that use a spam filter for their customers are mainly using Edgewave, with a smaller amount using Barracuda.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
spam to get stopped requires the cooperation of ISP from around the world.
So far 2 solutions exists :
- bayesian filtering : with false positive and false negatives that entitles the user to consider you responsible for bad tagging (and lot of labor costs for tagging)
- black list that are close to useless now that IPv6 gives that much way to evade the BListing.
But, in the Babel tower we live in, you cannot coordinated with ISP especially that ISP makes money out of spam. And try to find a USA ISP where people speaks more than 1 language or a chinese that speaks french or german.
spam used to be 66% of the mail traffic (I don't know the stats today) and even with a 1/1000000 click it is so cheap there are incentives to go on.
But you know what? ISP don't care about ICANN, IANA, RIPE ... and the internet. They care about making the one who pays the more happy. And with spam and this undue traffic, it "pumps up" the fraffic, hence the 95th percentile, hence their revenues.
The RULES give incentive for people to cheat, why should they not?
IETF, ICANN, RIRs are broken ; who do they represent? The internet users? Internet is no democracy, it has shifted to an aristocracy.
Internet is slowly dying from a high noise signal ratio.
Because he has shit for brains and thinks HOSTs is worth a fuck when the OS bypasses it at will, as well as other browsers.
Spam filters need to go away, as they only pass the buck along in the war on spam. They cost dramatically more than the sticker price (especially when they are "free") as the email is still sent, parsed, and quarantined. After that the filters need their rules updated regularly to catch the latest spammer tricks. Meanwhile as the spammers' botnets get bigger and more sophisticated it just gets that much easier and less expensive to send out spam.
If you want to end spam, you need to acknowledge that spam is an economic problem and spammers send out spam because they make money doing it. There is one and only one way to end spam, and that is to prevent spammers from making money off of it. No legal - or extralegal - action will slow it down by any meaningful amount. Interrupt the money flow and the spammers will find other work.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Big companies like Google, Apple, Intel, etc. buy companies for access to their technology, for their patents and sometimes for their personnel. It is almost the normal thing for the purchased companies to be absorbed and their services to wound down. Google wants you to use nearly spam free G-Mail, not your own mail server or local ISP's mail service, so why would they continue offering a standalone anti-spam service? McAfee sells anti-spam as part of their security suites, why on earth would they sell the anti-spam service they've bought as an independent service under someone else's name?
Intel? Well who knows what goes on at Intel. My guess is that one management committee doesn't know what the other management committee is doing and haven't for decades now. Ditto Microsoft, IBM, etc.
They are the ones paying for all the spam.
I mean the money comes from someone.
I outsourced my email service to HRC. But don't tell anyone, it's top secret.
You might take a look at appriver secure tide (https://www.appriver.com/services/spam-and-virus-protection/) email filtering. It's SaaS email filtering that you put in front of your smtp server. It has reasonably good controls and does a better than average job. It's reasonably priced.We use it and have been happy with the filtering quality, price and support.
Barracuda networks also sells a SaaS spam filtering service, haven't used it, but have heard good things about it.
Your posts suggests that spam isn't a problem anymore. That's ridiculous.
I manage numerous private email systems and spam is still a major pain point even when filtering through geographic firewall block lists, greylisting, multiple RBLs, Amavis, and spamassassin/clamAV.
Greylisting was highly effective in the beginning, but for the past couple of years it only adds delays, the spammers handle greylisting with ease these days.
Also, clamAV has become a major disappointment, probably because Cisco acquired them. But, even when I submit samples they fail to add them to the signatures WEEKS later and the cryptovirus downloaders are just out of control.
The simple answer is to block vulnerable attachments, but most businesses won't tolerate blocking .docx, .pdf, .zip and all of a sudden Oprah pops up; You get cryptowall, and you get cryptowall, and you get cryptowall, and you get cryptowall, and you get cryptowall, and you get cryptowall, and you get cryptowall,EVERYBODY GETS CRYPTOWALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FML
proofpoint is *expensive* compared to most mail security / spam filters we deal with as an MSP. I like MessageLabs despite Symantec's involvement, it runs very well. I'd always consider dropping in a Barracuda appliance as a fallback, and use it to multi-tenant a security/spam filter if MessageLabs was ever to go away.
You've never run Outlook in an Exchange environment. If you had, you would not say such utter shit.
I have been building and managing groupware systems for 20 years. I STILL manage Novell GroupWise, Exchange, Zimbra, and a dozen home grown Linux systems(Postfix, Sendmail, qmail), as well as cloudy enterprise Office365 and Google Apps.
Outlook/Exchange is vastly superior to ALL of them, except Office365 which IS Outlook and Microsoft manages Exchange. Proxy access to other people's mailboxes or calendars, granular permissions, integration, smartphones, system management (1 server or 10,000 servers work as a single system, globally distributed mailboxes, access...)
Please do tell us all how your Thunderbrid with qmail/dovecot, or GMail is better than Outlook/Exchange. I need a laugh.
P.S. Google is doing a decent job with GMail, hangouts, et al but it's still limited and has a ways to go. (Only one automatic forwarding address? Really?)
I'm not saying it's the Freemasons, but it's the Freemasons.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
was that most companies running exchange were just using Microsoft's spam filtering. This is like when people tell me the market for Mac users is huge. Yes, there are a lot of Mac users and they _do_ have lots of money, but the trouble when writing business software for them is you have to take out all the users who aren't willing to go out and buy a $300 PC to run your software :(...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And most of them also do it reasonibly well. So privately i have not used filter software in a decade, and in this cloud-era,more and more organizations outsource mail, and only the real enterprise stuff survives.
Well, your first problem is that Exchange is a groupware server, not simply a mailserver. Exchange does mail and a metric shit ton more.
I have yet to see a Linux groupware server - other than Novell GroupWise - that can do what Exchange can do. A groupware system that provides email with shared mailboxes, full text indexing of content and attachments, mailbox settings/views in the mailbox, shared calendaring, ActiveSync for smart phones, active directory integration, VoIP/Video integration(even GroupWise lacks this), policy based archiving and retention, filtering, granular permissions per mailbox, web access, and a whole LOT more.
Exchange is a beast. It has every feature imaginable built in and integrated into a smooth easy to manage system.
Easy to mange? Did I just say that.? Fuck yes, it's easy to manage! Just a few point and clicks to do so many things. And with PowerShell - Powershell sucks donkey dicks!!!!!!!! - you can script any operation you like. Compare that with managing dozens or thousands of Postfix/dovecot/amavis/spamasssin installations where you have to edit text config files - which I happen to like - all over the place manually or with some kludge configuration management behemoth of scripts like Puppet or Ansible.
Every person that I see on Slashdot suggesting supposedly better options than exchange has zero experience with it.
Spammers would be prospective clients for Google advertising services
and be targets for Google to spam.
Go well
It is a tough nut to crack unless you have access to the complete mailboxes for the following reason:
- Any sort of AI/neural net/bayesian net is going to be only as good as the sample you train the system on. In most cases, it is easy to accumulate spam mails (honeypots etc), but it is hard to get hams (good mails). No enterprise customer would donate his "good mails" for research purposes.
- Running any sort of optimized neural network on customer box (via some sort of toolbar etc) doesn't help, because that is the first thing they disable.
- People are more likely to delete a mail rather than report a spam mail. Without access to usability data from their mail client, this causes more spam to more or less leak through.
- Spams are generally targeted regionally. A spam received by a person in USA is very different from the spam received by a person in China. This further restricts the accuracy of spam filters.
(Now these are not a problem for Google/Microsoft etc who have access to all these data)
Which leaves only secondary ways of detection: .. these are reactive rather than predictive, so some spams will always get through.
- Black list/pink lists/grey lists
- Rule based (regex/strings): Needs to be updated constantly, is less scalable, and needs a lot of multilingual people to stay up to date. Not very scalable.
- Reliance on the likes of libspf, which is still not as widespread as we'd like it to be.
Most email spam engines to my knowledge can easily catch upto 95% of spam.. may be 99% on a good day, but that remaining 1-5% earns them the ire of their customers. It seems to be just a labor intensive job, which is just not as rewarding as we'd like.
Probably because so many companies are moving to cloud based email, where its on the provider to filter spam rather than the Exchange administrator, that the market's just not there anymore. Besides, there's freebies like spam assassin that can help a lot for many organizations.
Did Microsoft do the 5 year thingie with the Nokia purchase?
The issue for me was that anytime I run one of these and put it up against google (we are on google apps) - folks get more false positive spams and more missed spams.
I'm serious - the free built in basic spam filtering in google is beating these complicated setups (and the IT people have done all sorts of tricky stuff).
More importantly - email gets through from customers - with the crazy stupid attachments... which it turns out are needed in the real world.
So even though I don't have to do a lot of admin on the google email side to turn on spam filtering or configure it, it works very well...
We've had good experience with Mailroute.net - actually replaced hardware Barracuda 300s with this, never looked back. Mailroute doesn't archive messages, just filters and forwards, so it won't help you if a you / a user deleted a message and you'd like to get a copy back from the 'backup'. But for basic filtering - really good, quite inexpensive. And for us the cost was really more about the $$ necessary to keep a Barracuda alive in a data center plus the yearly spam update subscriptions. It worked out to something like $2K / year for one Barracuda 300, and Mailroute is a fraction of that. YMMV / FWIW
...they are shutting down of obvious reasons:
1. you do not want a battle over your spam filter (not filtering your ads but filtering others ads)
2. your spam filter needs to filter your own ads
and there are lot of FOSS doing the same... and commercial implementations of those FOSS solutions.
Somewhat of a matter of approach. Most of them keep iterating on the same techniques in a constant arms race. Just so hard to make much more than an incremental progress and differentiate from everyone else.
I like the approach being used by Atriceps (http://www.atriceps.com)-- they're flipping the problem on it's head with a consent-based approach that looks for valid content and reputation, rather than exclusion.
Disclaimer: My company was in the Fall 2015 cohort of the Mach37 Cyber Accelerator with them.
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...
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Does far more w/ far less more efficiently vs. addons (clarityray blockable, redundant + RAM/CPU wasteful & 'souled-out' crippled by default) & local DNS servers @ home.
It fixes DNS' security issues & stops tracking @ webpage + DNS levels via 1 file you NATIVELY have!
(Firewalls do the rest on far less used IP address trackers/threats vs. host-domain names).
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* "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend".
APK
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See subject: ...I don't give away work to be stolen & misused like GOOGLE CHROME was http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... )
It's also been sourcecode verified by one of the best out there (a competent coder in his own right & malware researcher etc. - et al) -> "I've been asked to further clarify so for the record yes I've seen the code, and yes, it is safe."
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P.S.=> And, there you go for the 2nd half of your post's question & that's my answer with multiple proofs thereof to the trustworthiness of my code AFTER literal sourcecode verification + binary evaluation as clean by reputable sources (many of them - many of whom I had to DISPROVE over time as to false positives no less)... apk
See subject: It's THAT simple & not only do my sources provide current data vs. spam source/payloads sources (Malwarebytes' hpHosts -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... [hosts-file.net] , while there, see grm.txt & hrs.txt after it) but I scour the junkmail outta my email providers also to supplement it for my own personal protection.
* It's that simple & WHEN those are blocked as added? No more possibility of them delivering a malicious payload (if it's a DIRECT FILE attachment, I'm not dumb enough to open it either).
APK
P.S.=> You fail on THAT & the OS in Windows ONLY BYPASSES HOSTS FOR WINDOWS UPDATE (which it should vs. corrupted hosts, but using my program when resident MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO DO FROM USERMODE & I've tried, couldn't - WITH WFP/SFP supplementing it w/ ACL protection too? Impenetrable - IF it were done by say, a rootkit operating in RPL 0/Ring 0/kernelmode corrupted? I'd kill it using Windows Recovery Console (or newer Emergency Recovery Disk tools) spotting it using ListSvc, & Disable to kill it - or FixMBR - & THE NEXT UPDATE OF HOSTS via my program REFRESHES IT FROM A PRISTINE NEW COPY TOO, so you lose here too)... apk
See subject: It's THAT simple & not only do my sources provide current data vs. spam source/payloads sources (Malwarebytes' hpHosts -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... , while there, see grm.txt & hrs.txt after it) but I scour the junkmail outta my email providers also to supplement it for my own personal protection.
* It's that simple & WHEN those are blocked as added? No more possibility of them delivering a malicious payload (if it's a DIRECT FILE attachment, I'm not dumb enough to open it either).
APK
P.S.=> You fail... apk
Use proper email client like Thunderbird. It will weed out the spam. If you don't like it then there's always the source code or you can write a plugin.
Working for a mayor ESP, all I can say from my experience is that these spam-filters are a pain in the ass. Sure, they catch spam. But they also catch non-spam. And our users tend to complain a lot louder about *not* receiving sollicited email (especially when it comes to transactional emails; order confirmations, subscription confirmations, etc.) then they are about receiving unsollicted email.
On top of that, recent implementation of DKIM/SPF and DMARC have pretty much made DNSBL and spam-filtering obsolete. At least when it concerns operational datacenters that process thousands or millions of emails per day.
I see no one has made the obvious comment. Take a look at telemarketing in the west. CenturyLink actively resists any attempts at stopping telemarketing (such as lobbying against laws that would require telemarketers to broadcast their actual phone number instead of counterfeiting the phone number of your doctor's office). This is done for two reasons, CenturyLink OWNS a lot of telemarketing businesses. And even those they don't own generate profit because they use the phone system. It is simply NOT in their best interest to stop telemarketing. The same is probably true for spam, the profit margin from spam is enormous. It would not surprise me at all if the larger spamming companies were owned by the likes of Microsoft and Intel.
Spamming is much older than ARPANET
http://blog.modernmechanix.com...
In those days bombing could solve the problem for real. But in all seriousness, this is why there are international laws about broadcasting into another country's territory. A law that Radio Free Europe conveniently ignored during the cold war.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Having some insight into the actual products and mechanisms by which spam filtering is done, I can say fairly conclusively that the biggest issue at hand is that consumers cannot and will not pay for the hardware necessary to do spam filtering anymore. Let me explain:
In days of yore, spam filtering was done with an appliance (or server/service) that did heuristics scanning. This mechanism worked well, but people found that there were a lot of repeat offenders -- so let's just block them entirely with an RBL (realtime block list). This is easy to do with IPv4, as we have a relatively small amount of offending addresses. The amount of resources to load this RBL into memory and process emails in real-time was reasonable.
Enter the modern age:
Spam emails have gotten incredibly sophisticated. I've noticed that some blatant spam has even gotten through gmail's filters to my inbox lately. Heuristics are a large part of it, but when they're so complex, we really need to lean even more heavily on RBLs. Unfortunately, that's no longer feasible. Now that IPv6 has taken off, if you end up on the block list, you simply change your IPv6 address, and you're back in business. Since we have (for all intents and purposes) a limitless supply of IPv6 addresses, it's unreasonable to have an IPv6 RBL -- especially one that *any* appliance can load into memory and process in real-time -- for the same cost as an appliance that would previously handle an IPv4 RBL.
Here, we find our conundrum: spam has gotten to the point of bypassing all but the most brilliant of heuristics scanning mechanisms, and RBLs are no longer an option. In order to have an appliance capable of handling *everything* that a modern spammer can throw at you, you'd be looking at spending tens of thousands of dollars of raw material cost on a server -- plus the software and overhead to develop the solution into a consumer-facing product. That is in contrast to the relatively inexpensive solutions that were so prolific only a few years ago.
tl;dr: IPv6 killed the spam filter.
It's not just the commercial side of the world that's feeling the crunch. I wrote the Piratefish Anti-Spam System and sold it for years. It never did wonderful things, but it worked and did okay - and the customers loved it, loved building it, loved running it - and it worked.
Supporting a solution like it however is not fun. Linux distros are constantly changing support for things - the author of MailScanner is a dick and has managed to alienate any support from the major distros, the options to manage OS anti-spam tools are down to command-line or webmin with out of date plugins. Want to add SPF, other features, good luck - finding them, stitching them together, keeping them updated - all not easy as it should be with Linux - and OS reporting around mail logs is difficult to annoying on the setup side.
Basically the market is now tuned for the small-mid players like Barracuda. Proofpoints offering is solid too - cellular carriers use it to prevent spam on SMS - and it's got some nice features that make it worthy - including URL link re-writing (aka TAP) and FireEye/Wildfire attachment sandbox analysis. Those are tough features to compete with in the a small office environment.