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

Nobody is buying email software anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Gmail does a better job anyway, and outlook is for old people.

Re: Nobody is buying email software anymore

[mysidia]

Actually..... one of my clients is an E-mail hosting provider, and Microsoft has basically murdered the E-mail hosting business by giving away Office 365 for free to Academic entities and non-profits.

MS makes this out as a "donation", but the schools were reluctantly forced into switching to O365, even though the IT administrators felt that this would be technically inferior, and they expect the quality of support will be much lower.......

The simple fact is that Google and Microsoft are changing the E-mail hosting business from a business that can generate a little bit of profit, to a business that is completely non-profitable, and only very large providers will be able to offer this service.

Also, Microsoft and Google have their own spam filtering solutions, and they don't need to buy someone else's product, So they are also basically killing the Spam Filtering solution industry.

Spam filtering solutions have become very expensive over the years ---- so, if you want to sell a spam filtering solution, you basically get two choices: Either be non-profitable, or sell at a very high and increasing price, to a customer base that is rapidly decreasing in number (As Google and O365 are well on their way towards taking over the entire E-mail hosting business and eliminating all competition), and the higher prices will drive people towards the alternatives.

OR: Sell a specialized solution with extra features such as E-mail encryption or Archiving features that MS and Google cannot offer at scale (YET).

Re:The elephants in the room

[EmeraldBot]

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.

No, email in general is as strong as ever. The reason why it's not profitable is precisely there, however: it's mostly small ISPs who would buy this, and I don't think anybody would use their email service to begin with. The vast majority of us use either Gmail or Outlook, or a small number will self host our own personal email servers. It's a little shakier among smaller, paid email services such as Proton Mail(Privacy comes at a price, but I've heard their free version is still pretty decent), but my guess is these people also make enough to run their own spam filtering, so you're correct in saying the market's too small. Email as a whole is still a very popular medium, however, and I wouldn't go so far to say it's on a decline...