Study: Filter Appliances Serve Users Poorly - Leaking Spam, Trapping Good Messages and Waste Time

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Why Should Users Waste Money on Anti-Spam Products That Still Deliver Spam and Trap Good Messages?

Northborough MA, February 12, 2008 - Brockmann & Company, the customer insight firm, released today their latest report on the email experience entitled User Experience with Filter Appliances. The report is available for a limited time for free at http://www.brockmann.com.

"Filter appliances are all the rage in many market segments, despite the fact that users prove their effectiveness to be quite poor. Causing spam leakage into user's inboxes, trapping good mail from customers as if they are spam messages and causing employees to waste time searching folders for trapped messages are common flaws of filters - regardless of their form factor," said Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company.

The report compares the experience of filter appliance users with challenge-response users. Three aspects of the users' experience is reported:

• The average Spam Index (lower the better) is a measure of the quality of the email experience. Higher Spam Index means that users are spending more time dealing with spam, receive more spam in their inbox and frequently discover good messages in the trapped spam folder.
• The standard deviation of Spam Index (lower is better) is a measure of the variation in experience. The more uniform experience suggests that other variables - age of email address, commonality of users name which spammers often guess - are immaterial to the users' experience.
• The users Satisfaction with the email experience is a measure of the overall effectiveness of the business tool. Spam greatly affects user productivity and degrades their satisfaction with the experience.

These three comparisons are supplemented with a feature comparison of the filter appliance and challenge-response system.

Brockmann added, "Users of challenge-response systems had half the Spam Index, a third less variation and three times more satisfaction with the email experience than users of filter appliances. Clearly, filter appliances don't work as well as challenge-response systems, and their own users tell us so."


About Brockmann and Company

Brockmann and Company is a consulting and advisory firm serving high tech equipment & application vendors and service providers. Clients accelerate growth through customer research & thought leadership. Our motto: "In God we trust, all others bring data." Learn more at http://www.brockmann.com.