I think everybody who has been around the internet for some time will appreciate the frustration of wading through tons of spam before getting to your actual email messages. I use 6 email accounts which all have several aliases and for some domains I am the “catch-all”. My oldest email address stems from 1997 and as email address protection was not so much of an issue in those days, it’s probably on every spam list you can imagine. Over the last years my daily dose of spam has risen up to 600 messages a day, which brings the signal-to-noise-ratio for my email somewhere around 10%.
Of course there are several free and commercial spam filters available, some of which do work quite nice. I have used my share of them, all over the effectiveness spectrum, with the Outlook built-in filter somewhere at the bottom and my most recent experience with CloudMark Desktop among the best. But the problem with client side spam filtering is that your spam only gets filtered when it’s fetched by the spam filter client. This means that when you access your email through several means, like web mail, PDA, cellphone, Outlook, you should have spam filtering running on all those clients. For some of these access methods spam filtering isn’t even available and for those that are available, spam filtering has to be installed, configured and maintained, which can be a chore and a burden for your wallet in case of the commercial products available.
As spam will probably never go away and I personally do not like the challenge-response system used by some spam filters, where the sender of the email has to complete a challenge in order to sent email to you (spam filtering should be transparent to the sender of the email), the best solution for spam filtering is to do it at the server. This means that your email is filtered before it gets to the client, so no client configuration is needed, and all present and future email clients will benefit from this. But most of us don’t have our own server running on which to install such a filter. An even if you do, setting up and maintaining a spam filter on your server can be quite a hassle. Ideally, you would a want a fire-and-forget solution, that filters your email without ever requiring any configuration or maintenance.
Everyone who has worked with Gmail at one moment or the other, will recognize the power of Google’s spam filter. It has a very, very low false-positive ratio and it works just out of the box! Wouldn’t it be great to have Google’s spam filtering for your own non-Gmail account? (more…)