Most businesses have given a resounding thumbs down to the technologies used to keep spam out of their mail in boxes, a new survey has revealed.
The survey, entitled The Spam Index Report, found that most customers were not fully satisfied with the service they received from anti-spam vendors.
Over 500 businesses were polled by IT consultants Brockmann & Company, with 40 percent of the respondents having IT responsibilities.
Respondents found anti-spam services provided by ISPs to be the least effective of all solutions. Spam filters were found to be the next most ineffectual method of killing spam. Only 21 percent of respondents were "very satisfied" with their user-trained PC e-mail client spam filters. Open-source and proprietary email client filters were almost equally ineffectual, according to the survey.
Spam-filtering appliances were found to be slightly more effective than software filters, but the level of customer dissatisfaction remained similar for e-mail client and appliance spam filters, at 78 and 73 percent dissatisfied respectively.
Real-time black listing, a reputation-based system that collects feedback from users to manage a black list of known spammer IP addresses and domains, was also found to be dissatisfying for businesses, with only 24 percent saying they were "very satisfied".
Hosted spam filters fared slightly better -- but only marginally. Fifty-eight percent of respondents still said they were not "very satisfied" with the service they received from hosted e-mail-filtering providers.
The survey found that challenge-response anti-spam technology garnered the most business satisfaction, with 67 percent of businesses proclaiming themselves "very satisfied" with it. Challenge-response involves first-time e-mail senders being challenged with a reply e-mail, requesting that the sender reply to that message, to assure the original e-mail is delivered. According to the survey this is an effective anti-spam measure, as spammers seldom respond to the challenge e-mail.
Tom Espiner reported for ZDNet UK from London
All the described survey did was indicate how ignorant most of the "business respondents" still are about the whole thing.
Obviously, the only thing the majority of them cared about was how much spam made it into their own inboxes.
What they still don't care about is the global effect of all our combined behaviours, as indicated by their apparent support of "challenge/response" methods.
All C/R has proven it can do is simply redirect traffic away from the target mailbox. The respondents might see less spam because of that and think it's good. But, since the challenge most often gets sent to the wrong place (as most spam uses spoofed/forged addresses in the "To:" line), the one using C/R simply becomes a spammer, really.
Even when the intended message is not spam, C/R still creates the need for 3 transmissions (the original + the challenge + the response) to get it through.
It's not hard to see what effect C/R has on internet traffic. TRIPLING the amount of transmissions for legitimate mail, and blindly SHUNTING challenges into someone else's box is just showing a blatant disregard for the health of the internet.
Thumbs down on C/R.
What would really improve the situation would be to start cracking down of the countless businesses that continue to support spam, and the ones that seem to exist only to create it.
After all, it was the "marketing drive" in business that brought us spam, and that same "need to be market everything, everywhere, 24/7" that continues to exploit the internet.