Miles Associates LLC

Peter Brockmann today published a great report called The Spam Index Report (registration required but free). He has actually created a metric called the Spam Index which is really cool because it is easy to calculate and is user oriented. It is the sum of:

• Monthly (estimated) count of Spam messages dealt with
• Monthly (estimated) count of minutes spent dealing with Spam
• Monthly count of messages that need to be resent due to anti-Spam tools
• Monthly count of good messages marked as Spam (false positives).

In the report, Brockmann compared the performance of anti spam tools (filters, blacklists, and challenge-response) and their subcategories. The metric was really the Spam Index of the users after the implementation of each tool. Challenge-response was the most accurate and consistent tool.

“Challenge-response services allow known email senders to pass messages without interruption. They get these typically from users’ address books, or the outbound email stream or from the customer relationship management system. Messages from first-time senders trigger a ‘challenge’ message asking the sender to respond by clicking a link, replying to the message or visiting a website to release the message they’d sent to its final destination”.

This made me think about my own situation. I use gmail as a mail client, and gmail seems to use part of filtering and part of challenge-response (it approves people in my contacts). I estimate that my Spam Index is well under 100 with gmail’s tools.

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