Doh!

Networkworld states:

From McAfee and Symantec to Apple and Microsoft, most vendors that make antispam products are failing to fully satisfy customers, according to survey released Tuesday by the Brockmann & Company.

The best-performing technology by a large margin is made by challenge-response vendors like Sendio and SpamArrest, which challenge the identity of first-time senders, the report states.

But customers rarely are fully satisfied by antispam filters packaged with e-mail clients, hosted e-mail or commercial antivirus software. Too often, the products let spam messages through and mistakenly delete e-mail that’s not spam.

Thirty six percent of companies surveyed have lost business because of legitimate e-mails getting caught in spam filters, says report author Peter Brockmann, president and research director.

“Whatever products they have developed obviously haven’t been working,” Brockmann says.

That’s bad news, as PDF spam seems poised to overtake image spam as the next big problem. “Now it looks like there’s going to be PDF spam, which is even worse for businesspeople,” Brockmann says. “We sign purchase orders and pass contracts back and forth all the time.”

Further into the article…

The rate of customers who are not “very satisfied” is more than 70% for six of the eight types of antispam technologies. Commercial software filters, such as those produced by McAfee, Symantec and TrendMicro, fully satisfy just 22% of users, the report found. Filters that come with PC e-mail clients, like those from Apple, IBM Lotus and Microsoft, fully satisfy 21% of customers.

Why then, do companies still produce the same old answers to questions no one is asking? (Can we please purchase software that costs too much and doesn’t do what it advertises?)

Until we insist on better software by not buying bad software, things will not change.

Tags: microsoft, symantec, mcafee, trendmicro, apple, ibm, lotus, pdf