Today I was writing up what I hope will be a semi-regular email to the users of the company I work for detailing some new developments we had completed in the IT department. I wanted to include a little interesting statistic at the end so I logged into our Postini account to see how much mail we were processing monthly and how much spam we were blocking. No big surprise, we were running at about 80% of our inbound mail being blocked as spam. This is actually below some of the statistics showing as much as 95% of all email being blocked. The impressive statistic was that one mailbox accounted for 25% of all of our email while still having 93% of its mail blocked.
All of this made me think about the fact that I pretty much never see a spam message reach my inbox on Gmail or my work account as a result of these services. Google does it for me for free. For as easy as it is to block and as much spam as is being sent, how is it even profitable these days to send spam? There must be a significant number of people still, to this day, not using a high quality spam fighting service. By the way, if you happen to be in the market for one, head over to Purity Networks and take them up on their free user offer. This is a great alternative to services like Postini for your business.
Along these lines, I still cringe when I see people change their email because they changed ISPs. Since the advent of Gmail and the like, why does anyone continue to use substandard email or change their email more than once making a move to an ISP independent service? Google apps has even made it beyond simple to set up your own custom domain riding on their systems. Maybe it is just a lack of knowledge that keeps people tied to their ISP email. What do you think?
