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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?
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.
I think you will find that "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley explains it pretty well, in terms of game theory. Of course the game theory stuff is just analogical and suggestive, but I find it convincing.
Basically the default condition (just because it's mathematically the simplest) is where everyone is looking out for himself. That's the imaginary "state of nature" that Thomas Hobbes depicted in "Leviathan":
"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
Writing in the 17th century, of course, Hobbes knew little about evolution and nothing of ethology. His knowledge of pre-agricultural societies was drawn exclusively from the travellers' tales of those who had been to the Americas, Africa, or the East Indies. Thus he assumed, reasonably enough, that without formal states and societies people would have no communities at all. That turns out not to be the case, as hunter-gatherers normally live in groups ranging from family size to a few hundred - and they cooperate intensively.
Models of Hobbes' extreme case show that, as he expected, it's not good. People do vastly better if they cooperate, so we almost always find society developing naturally. People develop morals, and come to expect honesty and straight dealing - even altruism, which is often repaid.
Now here is the interesting part: in a society where 19 out of 20 are honest, a tempting niche opens up for those who aren't. By pretending to be honest, these criminals (or banksters, politicians, marketing executives, lawyers or whatever you want to call them) leech off the work of others to live comfortably with little effort. It seems that mathematics and nature are against efforts to make everyone good, because in a society where most people are good it is just too tempting to be bad.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Microsoft does give a version of Office 365 away for free for anyone. Its way wayyyy better than Google Docs. Also the commercial version of Office 365 is cheaper that Google docs in the UK & EU. Might even be cheaper in the US also but I dont care enough to look.
I created a startup in 2009 and decided on Google Docs as the main business organisation platform. It worked great while we were only 3 staff and our requirements were very simple. As we added staff and complexity Google Docs got worse and worse. We spent so much time trying to find ways round the lack of features and collaboration functionality that by the time we got to 25 ish staff the whole thing imploded.
Google docs is not really a business platform.
You want shared mailboxes? hahahaha no chance.
You want support for a commercial product? It just doesn't happen unless your idea of support is google forums.
You want to report a bug? Awesome, just dont expect any response to it or it to be fixed.
You need to sync with your on premise AD structure? You can in theory, in practice, you spend a lot of time resolving conflicts and it isnt worth the hassle.
So is Office 365 the magic bullet? No its not perfect but we now have 320+ users on Office 365 Business Essentials and it needs less support resource than Google Docs at 25 users.
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...
Thanks for the vote of confidence! (I'm from Roaring Penguin and am the MIMEDefang gal). But actually I go by DIanne now.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!