The survey, commissioned by Mimecast, a provider of web-based email management services, carried out amongst more than one hundred ICT managers, confirmed that the majority of them considered email to be the most important communication tool, 51% consider email to be the most important communication tool, ahead of the phone with 40% of the vote and postage with just 9%. The survey also revealed an alarming lack of confidence in the ability of spam filters to distinguish between spam and valuable email traffic: 54% of respondents check email quarantines at least daily and 22% check it a few times a week.
The reason for the level of nervousness and time wasted scanning for emails that had been incorrectly trapped is evident in the 60% of respondents who said they had lost important legitimate emails, which had been mistakenly caught in spam filters at least once a month - and in many cases this was a daily or weekly occurrence.
According to Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast, “These figures illustrate the inefficiency of the majority of LAN based and hosted anti-spam solutions available on the market today. Whilst staggeringly high, the amount of wasted time and lack of trust in existing solutions is not surprising, given the inadequacies of the various content-scoring methods used to identify and categorise spam.
What is perhaps surprising is that email filtering products have been around for around a decade but they seem to have evolved less slowly than the ability of the spammers to elude them. IT Managers are constantly under pressure to provision as 24/7 spam-free email service and ensure legitimate email is not lost.
We think this indicates the need for a new innovative approach to email management, one that - like our own - is an on-the wire, real-time solution that blocks emails at source and offers 98% protection against spam with no false positives or quarantines.”