The Spam Crisis Is Over

I was at a Kaufman Brothers Conference last week and was on a panel with three other VCs, Bob Davis of Highland , Deven Parekh of Insight Ventures, and Adam Dell of Impact Ventures.

It was a very good panel and we talked a lot about media, entertainment, paid search, and new technologies that are coming that will impact the media business.

At the end of the panel, we got to talking about email. I made the point that email CPAs are almost the same as paid search and yet Wall Street has written off email as an interesting category. The moderator looked at me quizzically and said, "isn't email dead?" We all said, "no way".

Then I tried to explain. I said that the spam problem has been solved. And then I asked the audience, which was primarily public market investors, to give me a show of hands if they have less spam in their inbox today than this time last year. I was expecting the whole audience to raise their hands, but I got less than a third to do that.

I guess my view on this isn't shared by everyone, but I really do believe that the spam crisis is over. Today, I saw a piece by Brian Cooley at ZDNet's AnchorDesk that makes the same point. Because it's not easy to link to it, I'll run his thoughts directly below:

Myth: Corporations can't deal with the spam flood.
Reality: Yeah, they can. Using CNET as an example, our server-side spam filtering works really well. In fact, the IS guys recently told me I could stop using MailFrontier on my PC and just let their mail servers kill spam. Yeah, right. But that night I apprehensively switched off MailFrontier and went home, expecting an onslaught of spam the next morning. Nope. No perceptible increase at all. And that was almost two weeks ago. Server-side filtering works well.

Myth: Spam is costing corporations a fortune to manage.
Reality: The server-side spam blocker SpamAssassin is open source, and it's free. Meanwhile, disk storage is the fastest decreasing expense item in all of IT, and IT will continue to shrink. (How do you think Gmail can offer the unwashed masses a gig of online storage?) And it seems nonsensical that corporations are spending money on lots of extra bandwidth just to handle the volume of spam. All of their bandwidth needs are increasing, and spam e-mail is just a part of that.

Myth: "I can't get anything done because I have so much spam to deal with."
Reality: You're sandbagging. In fact, here's some new data from IDC about our spam "workload." This is the amount of time spent dealing with spam as reported by people at work--and even these numbers look overblown to me:

This is a productivity crisis? Sorry, if Srinivathan in Bangalore took your job recently, it's not because spam killed your productivity.

Now, if your company isn't filtering spam at the server, it's their fault you're swamped. If they are filtering it and you're still bamboozled by the fraction of spam that does get through, then the hum of the air conditioner must also be killing you.

And I'm always surprised when I ask a few questions of people who tell me about the onslaught of spam that is choking their in-box. It's usually something like 100 spam messages per day at most. It's so daunting that they wait till the end of the day to deal with it, wringing their hands all the while and telling coworkers their e-mail is "a mess today--call me on the phone if you need to reach me." Wimps. Knocking off 100 spam messages takes me about 15 seconds spread over an eight-hour day. Even if you read at a fourth-grade level while your lips move, you can scan the subject lines and delete it all in a few minutes.

Now, I know this doesn't take into account all the feckless users who'll always be overwhelmed by anything technological: the grandmas on AOL, the poor slobs on dial-up, the people you see in John Mellencamp videos. But their e-mail traffic is not part of the nation's GDP.

The bottom line is that we're pissed about spam because we think of our in-boxes as personal space. But stop calling it a crisis.

Comments

[jackson]

Although I agree with Brian Cooley, I found his tone condescending, insulting, and so superior that I feel he's compensating for something. Deep down I think he wants to be in a Mellancamp video.

[billg]

Corporate spam may be fixed....but I can assure you its alive and well on the consumer level.

The amount of spam we get on our home email accounts is incredibly large...and getting larger.

[Chris]

The swipe at middle America was probably uncalled for :) Some of this nation's greatest technology schools are deep in Mellencamp country (Purdue, University of Illinois just to name a couple). The web browser was invented in Mellencamp country!

That said - I agree on the spam issue. I've long wondered how people were so boggled by this. I use Challenge-Response on my home account primarily to keep the porn spam completely off my home network - but before I set that up I was averaging 300 spams a day on my home accounts - total time to deal with it was probably 5 minutes daily. It just was never the big deal some claimed it was.

For BillG - there are countless free and very low cost baeysian spam filters that you can install on your home machines and have 95%+ success rates on spam blocking within a day or two. It's not rocket science.

[Steve]

Hree check this out:
Spam today, even more tomorrow, says IDC
http://www.integratedmar.com/ECL.cfm?item=DLY091204-5

[Yong Su Kim]

I do agree with your points about the spam "crisis". I do get a lot of spam, but the server side solutions do a pretty good job of filtering. It's more of a nusiance than a crisis.

To your other point about CPA of email, I think the real advantage of email is for upselling and cross selling when I have an existing relationship with the vendor. I don't think blind emails sent to generate leads are compelling unless they're highly targeted and personalized. It really is an additional category that should complement search based advertising.

[billg]

Chris....thanks for the suggestion....will check them out

[Charlie O'Donnell]

How come no commentary on fundraising? Both you and Brad Feld have gone through the process over the last year, but I haven't seen any thoughts on it.

[Royal]

I have to respectfully disagree. These kinds of comments make me feel like we're now living in some kind of post-apocalyptical world were it's considered routine to fight through zombies to get to our front doors.

The situation is still dire. Trigger-finger Brian Cooley may be happy about less clutter, but he's got a less reliable system, too (he obviously is blissfully unaware of the handful of important emails that are getting trashed).

And, MSFT's SenderID blow up this week underscores how difficult it will be to tack authentication on to SMTP.

It's interesting to contrast people's feeling about SPAM with their passion about RSS.

RSS is exploding in popularity because (1) it's anonymous and (2) reader is in total control.

Or said another way, I get information I want and there's zero chance for abuse.

That sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

[Anonymous]

Server-side spam filtering? Are you serious? How many important business messages have you lost because your server thought they "might be spam" and it simply deleted them? Do you even know how many? Do you even care? That might be OK for your business, but you'd have to be arrogant (or stupid) to assume that must be OK for everyone else's business just because it's OK for yours.

[rhombus]

Oh, the irony.

Dude, the spam crisis is worse than ever. It's a frigging catastrophe. And if comment spam on your blog isn't irony, then irony is truly dead.