IT/Revelations

Foundational Element 1 – Good Spam Filtering

Foundational Element 1 – Good Spam Filtering. Once you are able to accurately eliminate the junk mail, e-mail becomes infinitely more useful. One of my early “IT/Revelations” was that a good spam/virus filtering service would open the doors to new ways to use e-mail.

I am frequently surprised when I hear someone complaining about the amount of spam that they receive on a daily basis. Because of the filtering service that I use, I can honestly say that I haven’t received more than a handful of junk e-mail messages in the past year. And by a handful, I mean somewhere between 5 and 10. Back in the mid 1990s, various work related situations led me to develop a crude e-mail notification system that sent the sender and subject of each message to my pager as they arrived. This system allowed me to keep on top of things at the office without having to actively check my e-mail throughout the day. Unfortunately, the ugly thing we call spam was just around the corner, ready to make my pager go crazy.

I quickly modified the system so that it would only notify me if the message met certain criteria. Unfortunately, sometimes an important message wouldn’t meet the criteria, so I wouldn’t be notified of it. Whenever this would happen, my confidence in the notification system would drop and I found myself checking my e-mail frequently just to make sure something didn’t slip through. The battle against spam was like a road trip on many winding roads through the desert. Each solution had a different method with various levels of inconvenience. The most inconvenient was a service that required all senders to validate themselves the first time they sent you a message by clicking on a link in an auto-reply. Other systems use various server-level tricks that help separate the bad from the good.

It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I found a service called MX Logic that works wonderfully – without any false positives and without any inconvenience to the sender or recipient. I liked the service so much, I added it to our product offering as Street Sweep. There is an interesting shift in the usefulness of e-mail that takes place once the threat of spam is eliminated. Now that I can be confident that each message that reaches our server is legit, message notification or push e-mail finally makes sense. Now that push e-mail is not a nuisance, it can become a crucial building block for other products and services that will help me increase my productivity and my ability to keep up with things that are happening at work and home.