Spam Spam Spam Spam….

It's funny when it's Monty Python, but a massive pain in the butt in real life. I received 266 Spam emails yesterday. One day – 266. The problem isn't getting better, it's getting worse. I won't debate the "why does anyone take the time to create Spam?" issues – there are total A*holes in the world as we know. Tip: Don't respond to the ridiculous offers you get in your Spam and maybe they will stop sending them!

Anyway, I was ok with an odd little homegrown package build specifically for Notes (yes, I'm still running notes, and no, I don't know why) that worked pretty well. I thought it was a pretty easy to use white list/blacklist tool – if you sent me an email and weren't in my contacts folder (or often even if you were), you received a notice that told you to copy a long string and stick it in the subject line of your reply. Amazingly, I figure half of the people screwed up that simple instruction. Therefore, while the filter worked for machine generated noise, it also couldn't adapt to human moronity, which meant I always had a bunch of legitimate emails lost in the piles of Male Enhancement and downright filthy other offers. Sorry if I have blown your email off – I swear it was the system.

Our other guys finally started getting hammered with Spam as well so we moved to Postini as a quick fix. It works pretty well comparatively, so many complaints stopped. As a user I get a Postini email (which seems to get trapped, ironically enough, somewhere because I only see the email on my Blackberry – but not in my inbox) that gives me a link I can click to go to their site, log in, and peruse the spam of the day (which I don't do, because it doesn't show up in my Inbox). Like most users that turns out to be a hassle, so I don't do it. I've occasionally logged in to Postini when I have the time or inclination and can remember my password, but now the volume is so big it's pointless.

Then, as pure luck would have it, I found a nice Irish lad in my office last week from Spam Titan. The pitch was simple – we trap all your spam but make it easy for an individual user to administer their own lives. The system sends an email with the Spam embedded in it – so there isn't a need to go anywhere else. You can blacklist, white list, or deliver the email to your inbox in a microsecond. It has a bunch of other cool corporate features as well, but I don't even really care – it lets me control my own requirements without bugging our IT guys and its idiot proof (or "Me" proof, if you will). Best of all, it is grossly underpriced - $550 bucks for 100 users, and $4400 for 5000. That's ridiculous. I'll be showing them how to A: provide this offering to smaller groups and B: price to value and jack the prices higher for corporate accounts – so go get it while you can. http://www.spamtitan.com