It's about Finding New Links

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Spam Quarantines Considered Harmful

You may have heard me predict the death of email spam before. Briefly, the argument goes like this:

1. as more people's mailboxes are protected by anti-spam filters,
2. and as those filters get more accurate,
   
3. fewer spam messages get delivered,
4. so fewer products get bought from spam,
5. so less commission goes to spammers,
6. so the economic incentive to spam dries up.

However, there's a wrinkle in this oh-so-neat reasoning... quarantines. Anti-spam products keep most of the spam email in a holding pattern, just in case they accidentally filter out a legitimate message (a "false positive"). Users can browse the quarantine to check that the filter isn't deleting good mail. The problem is that the quarantine will be full of the very solicitations that we need to keep away from users' eyes if we are to defeat spam. (There are other problems too, such as the wasted productivity involved in checking the quarantine.)

What should be done? Anti-spam software should delete messages that are clearly spam. When modern spam filters assess a message, they do so using a battery of tests and criteria. This process usually produces an aggregate score. Some spam messages score so high that they're clearly spam. There's practically zero chance that this might be a legitimate message. Anti-spam software should only present grey-area messages to the user in the quarantine.

Categories: spam, quarantine.

Easy pickings in small organizations for Linux-based Email, but beware sales overheads

For vendors of Linux-based email servers, the low hanging fruit are in the low end: organizations with fewer than 250 seats. However, many of those organizations have little Linux expertise, so the key is for email vendors to work with VARs who can make these engagements a success. There's an opportunity here for VARs to provide a "fit and forget" solution. Contrast this with a solution that the customer must tweak and fiddle with.

However, sales to smaller organizations have potentially higher sales overhead costs per mailbox. The key for vendors is to partner with VARs who will allow a business model to generate sufficient profit. I've seen the VAR model work at first hand, particularly in Europe. The challenge wasn't the volume of prospects, but of keeping the sales overhead low enough.

The potential for selling to medium-to-large-sized organizations also exists, but with much longer sales cycles. This can present a different challenge to under-funded vendors, but an opportunity for well-funded people such as Scalix.

[Edit: Aug 18 - f(R) pointed out that used "cost of sales" incorrectly]

Categories: Linux, Scalix.

Bastardcast August 2 - Don - Ten Dollar Love

Don - Ten Dollar Love

Includes the music from the Citroen dancing Transformer robot TV ad. (Les Rhythmes Digitalis - Jaques Your Body). Also M.I.A. and stuff.

Categories: podcast, bootleg, mashup, bastard pop, bastardcast.

Now you can subscribe to this blog by email

Now you can subscribe to this blog by email, in case all that RSS feed stuff isn't for you.

[Updated: Sept 27 with improved service]