Bad, Richi, bad

Yes, yes, it's true, I wilfully mischaracterised (or at least oversimplified) what Curt Monash said. But the nature of IT Blogwatch is to be short and punchy, even at the risk of being "cavalier."

Here's what I think about Curt's later points:

1. I don't see that hosted anti-spam providers justify their fees based on bandwidth costs. It's a factor in their stated benefits, but by no means a primary one. Simply, hosted providers mitigate the TCO of running your own anti-spam and AV setup. Also, their customers get the benefit of their expertise and economies of scale.
   
   
2. Full email outsourcing didn't take off a few years back because Exchange is too expensive to scale up. It's really hard to get the economies of scale using Exchange. Alternative technologies weren't available. The closest the industry got was HP OpenMail, which became "unavailable" at just the wrong time. Nowadays, we have Scalix, which seems like it would be a great solution for an Exchange-like hosted solution. "Outlook Dialtone," as I used to say.
   
   
3. IMHO, false positives need to be 0.01% or less. For a typical user, that equates to roughly one "lost" message every couple of months.

Obviously, I didn't achieve a PhD at age 19, but I still manage to con David into paying me to talk about this stuff ;-)

Categories: spam.