Here Lies Email, RIP
February 2, 2004
The signal-to-noise ratio for email reached an all-time low for me this weekend. Mydoom certainly did its part in this, especially since someone on a social mailing list to which I subscribe was infected, leading to scores of bogus messages per hour. I have basically four email addresses, two of which are “public,” and then I administer four more emails for my primary domain. I use tools on the server side and the client side, and I still had over 700 bogus emails reach my inbox between Friday noon and Sunday evening. At one point, after not being online for a few hours, I logged on and downloaded 179 emails, not one of which had any value whatsoever.
How do larger organizations deal with this? And is anyone measuring the real economic impact of this? The costs begin with the server and storage costs, and the technical resources for managing the problematic sides of email. But then there is the loss of productivity for each user who must deal with problematic email that reaches them. Someone commented recently that each new filter and tool employed to deal with problem email raises expectations among end users, only to eventually disappoint and leave them even more frustrated then before.
Is the solution out there somewhere—and sometime soon?
Posted by Bill Trippe at February 2, 2004 7:58 PM
Comments
Hi Stephen,
Good to see you, and thanks for the posting.
I agree, it is even more grim than I have stated here. I have gone through a period of several weeks now where I have ratcheted up the filtereing and have been leaving some "real" emails blocked until I had time to review them. Also, my ISP blocks certain ranges of IP addresses at times, leaving valid emailers blocked out. I am glad some people have been persistent enough to send the same mail again to my backup addresses.
I heard through the grapevine recently of a small email filtering company here in New England being bought out by a larger tools vendor. I hope we start seeing better products and processes soon.
Bill
Posted by Bill Trippe at March 8, 2004 7:50 PMPost a comment
Comments for this entry have been closed.
Yeah it's nuts.
I've had marginal luck with rules. The best default spam filtering I've experienced is yahoo mail, though it's probably part of the feature set you pay for.
At work, I don't get spam, but there's still an enormous amount of noise. Even more problematic for me is that I don't have very much confidence that messages I send out are being read at all -- each one of which is vitally important to my organization's very survival, naturally.
So my question is this: If everyone is sending all this stuff out, and no one is reading any of it, wtf are we doing here anyway besides wearing out our Delete keys?
Posted by Stephen Gilson (aka farmboss) at March 8, 2004 8:31 AM