What Google Should Do With Postini

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about and investing spam prevention. I was an early investor in Bright Mail, the first anti-spam company, which was bought by Symantec a number of years ago. I am also an investor in Return Path, which owns the Sender Score business which uses reputation scoring to help both senders and receivers eliminate spam and help legit mail get through. And we've been customers of Postini at Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures for as long as I can remember using a spam filter.

So it's nice to see the team at Postini get a win with the sale to Google that was announced today. As good as Postini is, it can be better. Here are the things I'd like to see Google do with Postini:

1 - allow me to search my quarantined mail. i have no idea why Positini hasn't offered this feature. i've been asking for it for years. Given Google's credentials in search, this should priority number one.

2 - figure out how to stop grabbing verification emails. pretty much every service i sign up for sends me a verification email. and at least half of them are gobbled up by Postini. I am not complaining too much because Postini stops so much spam that I have learned to tolerate the false positives. but for some reason verification emails are always treated badly.

3 - let me manage my quarantined mail in the gmail interface. actually that would be a great way to solve the search problem. quarantined mail is still mail. i'd like to use my quarantined mail like a mailbox, not a trash can.

4 - let me see the reputation of the sender in the quarantined mailbox. i would like to sort by that as a way to find false positives. Sender Score can help with that.

The bottom line for me is quarantined mail is not all spam. And never will be. Google can make Postini so much better by focusing on all the mail that is caught by the filter and making it usable to me.

And in addition to the awesome team at Postini, I'd like to congratulate my good friends at Mobius Ventures and Foundry Group for their big win on their investment in Postini. Another smart investment pays off. Well done everyone, including Google.

Comments

[jeremy]

we need a semantic email client.

[Robert Dewey]

the reputation of the sender would be specific to their network. if someone i know sends me an e-mail, they get higher priority than someone six-degrees away, even though they might have a high sender score.

we need convergence of e-mail with social networking.

[Sameer]

I have also been a customer for a while now and one more suggestion I would throw into the mix is better support for aliases that point to primary email addresses. Quarantining spam coming from aliases is not as good or non existant in some cases.

[Jarid]

5 - Let legitimate email marketers sign up for whitelisting so emails customers opt-in to are not falsely quarantined.

[Randy Stewart]

Fred -

I'm a product manager for Boxbe, a market based solution to spam and our service offers many of the requests you've made above.

A little background on Boxbe -

Instead of using complex spam filters, we let the sender and the recipient determine if the email is spam or not.

In practice that means that we only allow messages from senders through to your inbox that you have pre-approved, take a test or that pay a fee.

Our users set their fees (or let us set them) according to what their time is worth (I recently suggested to another VC that he set his price at $99, our maximum, to filter bad pitches). If the emailer is a person (ie not an automated sender) you can optionally allow them to take a test (a captcha) to prove it. We take 25% of the money received and the recipient receives the rest.

Answering your suggestions above:

1. You can search your quarantine for senders and subjects quickly in Boxbe.

2. We have a list of verified senders (mostly ecommerce, but we are adding to the list all the time) that users can opt to allow through.

3. Ok, we don't have this. If Gmail provided an API like Yahoo!, we could. Speaking of which, we will have this exact feature for Yahoo! very soon.

4. Every message is scored for its likeliness to be spam and we display this in the quarantine. Additionally, we bubble the least spammy messages up to your account home meaning (theoretically) less time in the actual quarantine folder. We know that no email filter is perfect

We're a relatively new company and would appreciate any other suggestions you might have.

If you have any questions for us, email me at randy@boxbe.com.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager
randy@boxbe.com

[Rob K]

For what it's worth, you can already search within spam in Gmail by adding is:spam to your query.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/05/gmail-filters.html

[Devin Ben-Hur]

Jarid: As a "legitimate" email marketer it's your responsibility to craft a directed and relevant message. If you're incapable of composing a message that passes default settings for spamassassin and postini, why on earth would anyone want to add you to their whitelist?

[Devin]

Devin,
I personally sign up for many marketing emails, and 9.5 times out of 10, they are a falsely quarantined in Postini. It has nothing to do with "directed and relevant" messages. I explicitly opted-in to these emails, and I don't get them without having to go into Postini to manually approve them. That is a not a good experience for the marketer or the consumer.

[David]

Fred, your requests for searching your quarantined email points out the major problem with anti-spam solutions.

Killing spam isn't the difficult part, NOT killing legitimate email IS the difficult part.

That is why we built our anti-spam engine from the ground up to protect the message. We lead the anti-spam industry with the lowest false positive rates. Period.

For the first few years of selling anti-spam appliances we didn't even have a quarantine because false positives weren't a problem for us. We ended up adding quarantine because it was on the buyers "check list" for an anti-spam solution. To this day, the majority of our customers don't use quarantine because they've experienced first hand that MailFoundry just doesn't kill their real email.

The industry has a problem with false positives to the point that now folks like you are spending more time dealing with hunting down lost emails than the time you would spend just hitting the delete key on spam.

Our goal when designing our anti-spam engine was to change the sorry state of spam filtering in how it's basicly ruined email reliability. Before anti-spam systems you never asked, "did you get my email?", but now everyone is suspect of their filters. And who can blame them? The industry as a whole has failed in this respect.

MailFoundry's anti-spam engine kills spam and will leave your legitimate email alone, guaranteed.

I'm thrilled for Postini. They've done a great job in building tremendous value. In terms of product, in every customer head-to-head trial that's been done, we've beaten them (and everyone else) every time in terms of kill rates, false positives and especially price for total cost of ownership. (even when our appliances are compared against a hosted system like Postini, we're a better value).

As founder and CEO - I also run the R&D team. (I'm a programmer in my former life. ;-) We invested in our engine about 3 years ago after being frustrated with other engines (Brightmail, etc.) and decided we COULD and WOULD build a better mousetrap. We did. Our engine kills ALL types of spam. Yes, even that pesky image spam and the "new" PDF spam. And no, we don't use OCR or any "spam assassin" type engines. Those engines guess at spam. Our engine KNOWS spam and as a result we don't generate false positives.

MailFoundry is available both as an appliance based solution and as a hosted anti-spam service. If you are a small company, our hosted service provides scanning for the first 10 mailboxes for free. (so, have 10 or less mailboxes? You get free anti-spam!)

Check us out. We're a small privately held company that I've funded myself. We're profitable and growing like a weed. We own all of our IP and I believe that this will increase our valuation in the long run.

Regards,

David Troup,
Founder/CEO - MailFoundry

[J.D.]

I've worked on the two largest mail systems the world has ever seen (check with your pals at Return Path, they'll confirm I'm not exaggerating), and one of the most important things I've learned is that spam isn't the same everywhere. Spammers attack different sites in different ways, and at different volumes, and from different sources. And, even more importantly, different sets of users may consider different "grey area" messages (sometimes including those verification messages) to be spam.

Direct feedback from users is extremely important. Google knows this -- they've given users the ability to report a message as spam (or not spam) since the beginning, following the example set by Yahoo! and AOL and Hotmail. Postini has never had that option, and their service has suffered for it.

So, what Google should do with Postini is simple: make it more responsive to users.

And what Postini should do with Google is remind them that they aren't the only (or even the most important) mail system on the planet.

[Peter]

Speaking of Google, maybe it's time to announce that the emperor is buck naked?

Google as a whole is not good for small business any longer. It's a black box designed to extract as much money as possible from small business while giving back as little value as possible. This piece explains why Adwords is something to be skeptical about: "Why Google Adwords is Not Helpful to Small Business" http://smartstartup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/a-fable-doing-b.html