We've all heard of Web 2.0. But, have you heard of Spam 2.0 - which affects all of us who provide e-mail services and was borne just two months ago? At
groupSPARK Exchange Hosting, we've noticed that our inbound spam has pretty much doubled over the last two months.
According to Postini, they have seen spam rates increase by 73% in the last two months. And in this eWeek article, Barrcuda Networks is seeing a "67 percent increase in overall spam volume."
What's causing this sudden spike in spam? According to the article in eWeek, Russian hackers have created a massive peer-to-peer botnet by hijacking the PC's of tens of thousands of unsuspecting users to send out unprecedented amounts of SPAM. And this group of hackers has upped the ante in the spam battle by embedding images that evade spam "fingerprint" scanners by changing a few pixels every time and also by using backgrounds that make OCR technology useless.
Many of these spam emails promote penny stocks and according to this New York Times article, Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself, the stock prices do actually increase 5% - 6% after a flood of spam, enabling the spammer to make a quick buck. I know it's hard to believe that people buy Viagara and penny stocks from junk e-mail, but unfortunately it is true.
The profits incent spammers to continue their battle to outfox spam filters, which creates problems and opportunities for us providers who offer e-mail hosting. The problem is dealing with the headaches of higher levels of e-mail overall and investing in better spam detection technology. The opportunity is to upsell customers on "premium" spam filtering technology. I've heard from several hosting providers that their customers are demanding better spam filtering to fight spam 2.0, but in some cases are unwilling to pay additional fees for it. I think it's time that spam filtering ceased to be a commodity and back to being a premium service. After all, isn't spending $1-2 per user per month worth the time saved by the users? What do you think? Are the spammers winning?
Also, check out this spam statistics page provided by Postini.
I think if hosting providers push spam filtering as a premium service, more end users might be encouraged to use Gmail. For instance, Om Malik write in his post that:
http://gigaom.com/2006/12/06/spam-sucks/
"Some of us simply have set up elaborate rules where we route emails to our Google Mail account, and then route it back to our main email account. That helps, since Google has good spam filters."
And someone else immediately responded that:
"We were using our own mail hosting until we switched to the Google hosted apps last week. It is amazing how good their filter is. I went from just about pulling my hair out to disappointed that I don’t get mail anymore. I find myself constantly scanning the spam folder searching for a false positive, but have yet to find one. Or perhaps I am just lonely and miss my spam."
More interesting, another commenter said email is no longer viable - and I've heard that from a couple of my friends. They say sooner rather than later, we will use RSS for 1 to many communication, wikis for many to many, and IM/VoIP for 1 to 1. In fact, Google, Yahoo and Zimbra have all made news with email/IM integration. Do you think see Microsoft moving in the same direction with Exchange?
I personally would be happy to pay an extra $1-2/month for good spam detection but you're fighting the fact that email has always been free and, as Isabel points out, there are free services like gmail that do a fine job for most. Indeed, her comment that there are some people that may migrate to other free services to get away from the email problem I found very interesting. For most I think it will be a pain driven decision and thus will reflect the speed at which the free services keep up with the amount of spam. As inconceivable as I find it with the amount of spam we get, if folks won't pay $1/month for good spam blocking then it doesn't sound like the spammers are winning.
The only discouraging part of all this may be the economics - as the spam filters get better spammers will need to send out more and more spam in order to make money.
Isabel's comment about <a href="http://www.gmail.com">gmail</a> may have been true six months ago but today my SPAM folder is just as full as a <a href="http://mail.yahoo.com">Yahoo!</a>, MSN or AOL account might be.
Paying a few dollars per month for spam filtering is fine, provided that the filtering technology and algorithims are constantly tweaked to keep apace with changes in spammer technology. I don't want to pay for a service that keeps just as busy with my delete button as I was before making payment. Even sender-verification systems like <a href="http://www.spamarrest.com">SpamArrest</a> are not a perfect solution.
Time is money. Whether or not paid spam-filtering services will receive mass adoption will depend on how many people feel that the time they will gain from less inbox clutter has higher value than the money they will spend for advanced spam protection services.
Hosted services providers should be researching ways to effectively combat spam for their customers without having to charge them for this "premium" service. There are different ways to do this depending on the size of your service and customer base.
I know that services like Postini are a bit expensive when you don't have many accounts, but if you can commit to a large number of accounts you can get really good discounts. You could go with a service that does flat rate pricing per mail server like Easy Antispam. Depending on your size and infrastructure setup you could go with an antispam appliance like MailFoundry, Barracuda, or others.
Depending upon your needs and the solution you choose you can get the cost per domain down to a few cents per month.