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?

Comments

Maybe it's not profitable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's not profitable?

Re:Maybe it's not profitable?

[mindwhip]

It's as likely both bought out companies had a patent or some other similar technology that the large company wanted. 5 yeas is probably how long they had to keep the old company running to avoid some legal issues such as employee rights or stock market regulations.

Re:Nobody is buying email software anymore

[Nutria]

Outlook is for business, because Exchange is for business.

Re:The elephants in the room

[Nutria]

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.

You're completely ignoring every company that runs an Exchange server.

Seems like a fairly small market to me

It's a huge market.

with E-mail generally on a slow, steady decline

With such a low ID number, you can't be an idiot college student. Maybe you've just never worked for an Very Large Company.

I'll go the other way here, spearphishing

[holophrastic]

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?

Hopefully because spam filters don't work

[damn_registrars]

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.