Zérospam

In the spring of 2006, the CRIM (a prominent  IT research centre) conducted a four-week evaluation of the ZEROSPAM filtering solution. Below are the findings of this independent evaluation:

• The service was quickly activated.
• There were no noticeable delays in email delivery.
• Two email addresses were identified as control addresses, and CRIM measured the daily amount of spam received for both addresses before the filtering began. After 4 weeks of filtering, ZEROSPAM's detection rates were 96.8% (4 spam/day after activation vs. 125/day before activation) and 96% respectively (1 or 0.5 spam/day after activation vs. 25/day before activation).
• The weekly statistics provided by ZEROSPAM enabled CRIM to determine that spam was using a great deal of bandwidth. In fact, 67.5% of messages reaching the gateway were spam (99,045 legitimate emails and 206,082 spam messages accepted at the gateway during the evaluation period).
• Given that it takes one minute to deal with 6.6 spam messages*, CRIM determined that, altogether, its employees were spending 130 hours/week dealing with spam.
• The false positive rate during the evaluation period was 0.001% (total of 10 false positives, 6 of which were associated with mailing lists, for a total of 99,045 legitimate emails received).
• CRIM users greatly appreciated being able to whitelist certain domains so that they would not be filtered.
• The quality of ZEROSPAM's technical support was found to be excellent.

* According to a survey of 1,000 adults conducted by the University of Maryland in November 2005, it takes an average of 2.8 minutes to deal with 18.5 spam, or 6.6 spam per minute. This measurement does not take into account the distraction caused by spam (disruption of concentration; time required to refocus attention after the interruption; tendency for people to discuss or read spam out loud, etc.).