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Virus Bulletin finds spam filters are blocking less spam
July 2012 by Virus Bulletin
Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification body, has
announced the results of its latest anti-spam comparative
review: 21 solutions achieved a VBSpam award, but the majority
of products saw a decline in spam catch rates - a trend first
noticed in March this year.
"We first saw a decline in spam catch rates at the beginning of
the year," said VB’s Anti-Spam Test Director, Martijn Grooten.
"We hoped this would be a one-off thing - perhaps the
consequence of a new spam campaign. But rather than bounce back,
spam catch rates have continued to decline throughout the year."
Grooten continued: "It is important to realise we are still a
very long way away from the scenario of email accounts becoming
unusable because of the vast amount of spam. We certainly
haven’t lost the war against spammers, but they have won an
important battle."
The best performance in this month’s test came from SpamTitan,
which blocked 99.93% of all spam messages without blocking any
legitimate mail, and as such it was the only product to obtain a
’VBSpam+’ award (to qualify for the VBSpam+ award, products must
achieve a spam catch rate that is higher than 99.5% and a zero
false positive rate).
The VBSpam quadrant plots products’ spam catch rate against
their false positive rate, with the top right-hand corner the
area products should be aiming for (with maximum spam catch rate
and minimum false positive rate). The front-runners in this test
can clearly be seen from their positions on the quadrant at
http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/charts/vbspam-chart-0712-1200.jpg
(journals and websites are permitted to reproduce this chart
unedited).
The results of the July 2012 anti-spam comparative review can be
seen at http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/archive/test?id=177
The full review, including detailed results tables, is available
to Virus Bulletin subscribers or can be purchased as a
standalone review ($19.95) from
http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/archive/list
