Common Spam Complaints

In my line of work I support a lot of email users at a lot of different companies, and that means I am ultimately responsible for two things – the successful delivery of legitimate email, and the prevention of spam.

Over the years this means I have heard a fairly regular list of complaints about email and spam, some of which are due to misunderstandings about the capabilities and limitations of anti-spam products.  Here are some of the most common ones I hear.

This Spam Filter Isn’t Blocking Spam

The first complaint by the customer is usually that their spam filter is not working.  The event that raises this complaint can be as simple as the CEO’s assistant noticing a single spam email in her boss’s inbox.

I quickly remind them that no anti-spam protection is 100% effective, and that the one or two spam they receive each week is a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of spam that is actually being rejected.

Fortunately all good anti-spam systems come with comprehensive reporting features so I can show them that even though they or their Help Desk has reported a few spam emails reaching user mailboxes, the anti-spam system blocked thousands of them in that same time period.

This Spam Filter Is Blocking My Emails

The opposite complaint to the first is usually from someone who did not receive an email that they were expecting and it was subsequently found in the spam quarantine.  I’ve had single occurrences of this lead to people declaring the anti-spam software broken and demanding it be removed so that their important emails aren’t blocked again.

Once again I remind them that 100% accuracy is non-existent in the spam prevention game, that removing the anti-spam software would mean thousands of spam emails get through (the reporting comes in handy here again), and that the occasional false positive is best dealt with by utilizing end user self-service features.  These allow users to manage and release their own quarantined items, usually those items that are only slightly “spammy”.False positives are something that email administrators constantly work to avoid by tuning the anti-spam features over time, but they can also be avoided with features such as Bayesian filtering and by avoiding common mistakes that can lead to legitimate email being marked as spam.

We Can’t Afford Spam Filtering

To me saying that you can afford an email system but not an anti-spam system is like saying you can afford a car but not the insurance.  For a small additional investment you receive a high level of protection against a problem that is quite likely to occur.

In businesses of nearly any size the cost of not using a spam filter can be greater than the cost of the filter itself.  When presented with this type of cost breakdown most customers agree that spam filtering is both necessary and cost effective, and they tend to be quite happy with the reduction in spam too.

We Can Do This with Free Software

I’ve personally got nothing against free software, I use plenty of it myself, but in the email security space I am yet to find a free anti-spam software product that comes anywhere close to providing highly effective, easy to use, and feature rich spam protection that scales well to organizations of any size.  I will agree that some of these products are great at one or two of those things, but none that I have evaluated can do all of it as well as the commercial products we regularly deploy for customers.

What Spam Complaints Do You Hear Most Often?

Those are the 4 most common complaints I hear from customers when it comes to anti-spam systems.  I wonder what sort of complaints other email administrators often hear.  Please share your stories in the comments below.