Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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...
Outlook is for business, because Exchange is for business.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
So anybody could get it for free except people like Abraham and Moses?
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?
Microsoft does give a version of Office 365 away for free for anyone. Its way wayyyy better than Google Docs
I don't know about features (I only use the most basic of features in office apps) but I've found Google Docs to have far more polish. That is, it seems faster, objects seem to go where you intend them easier, and it's also easier to figure out how to do what you're trying to do.
A prophet is not without honor except in his hotmail, and among his relatives, and in his own house.
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 fact that you have a MAIL SERVICE that literally eats the entire resources of a server, belches and screams for more
I -- as an end user -- don't care.
all while delivering bare functionality, for a minimal number of people is an absolute joke.
I use T-bird on my Linux desktop at home, and Outlook integrated with Exchange on my work laptop. Not only is Outlook a manifestly superior email client, the quite useful group calendar functions are infinitely better since... T-bird doesn't have group calendar functions.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! (I'm from Roaring Penguin and am the MIMEDefang gal). But actually I go by DIanne now.
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.
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).
Chas might be more sophisticated than I am, but I've been happily using postfix since abandoning sendmail in `99.
And on the client side... SMTP and ( IMAP or POP )
I use T-bird on my Linux desktop at home, and Outlook integrated with Exchange on my work laptop. Not only is Outlook a manifestly superior email client, the quite useful group calendar functions are infinitely better since... T-bird doesn't have group calendar functions.
The non-e-mail functionality does not make it better at e-mail. i still haven't figured out how to add custom headers to individual Outlook e-mails, or prevent it from rewriting the addresses I put in, or check mail routing for a message before sending, or export an e-mail in SMTP format, or prevent it from modifying headers or body (tus making it useless with standalone encryption/signing), or a bunch of other things that are e-mail specific.
As for non-e=mail features, some of them are a bonanza for malware writers, like OLE integration, preview panes, context-sensitive rendering and much more that isn't part of e-mail.