The Web 2.0 Foul-Up: A Postini Follow-Up

My recent spam (and bigger-picture Web 2.0) rant was of interest to a fair percentage of you, judging from the number of both public comments and private emails I received in response to its publication, so I thought I’d craft a follow-up post. When I was in Taiwan two weeks back, plagued by a spam-pummeled work email inbox, I shot off a message to my IT counterparts containing a simple query; was spam filtering perchance disabled on my account, or was my account configured with inappropriately lax settings? IT’s response was prompt and to-the-point; of course Postini was enabled, and the filtering settings were global for Reed’s email system, not account-specific.

This response didn’t jive with a comment my writeup got from a reader named Allen, and it also was counter to the experiences of my co-worker, Matt, who claimed to almost never see spam in his inbox. On a hunch, I figured out how to log onto my Postini Message Center…and lo and behold, I found that spam filtering was completely disabled on my particular account. Another email to IT (this one admittedly more vitriolic in its verbage) got spam filtering turned on, and the relief was immediate, with only a few spam messages getting through in the last 24 hours. I’ve got all of the Postini filtering settings (bulk email, sexually explicit, get-rich-quick, special offers, and racially insensitive) at their most-aggressive levels right now, and the daily Quarantine Summary email I just received (which, amusingly but understandably, got tagged as spam by Outlook’s built-in filtering due to its subject-line list content) only contains one incorrectly-tagged valid email out of the several hundred that Postini redirected away from my inbox.

None of this, of course, detracts from the fundamental point of my prior writeup; that community-influenced ‘experiences’ such as Gmail’s spam filtering algorithm will be inevitably degraded by the inconsistent and non-altruistic natures of community members. Nonetheless, I thought you’d like to know of my increased confidence in Postini’s alternative spam-filtering approach