The World Is Not the Center of the Universe, and Filters Don’t Stop Email Spam

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Why did Google succeed when it entered a market dominated by several established, well-funded search engines? Simply put: Because its product was so far superior to what its competitors were offering it became the gold standard for search engines. It wasn’t a triumph of marketing or hype—Google won because it outperformed the competition. This sort of success isn’t unique to the high-tech world. Companies such as Toyota and Wal-Mart also entered and dominated crowded markets for one reason: they saw the existing paradigms in their industries and realized that they were wrong!

Which brings us to spam. Filters are the dominant paradigm for fighting spam, and just about everyone uses them. Unfortunately, they don’t work: the best filters on the market block only about 95 percent of spam messages. This may sound like almost total spam eradication, but in a large enterprise, the remaining five percent can mean thousands of unwanted messages. So why are people so welded to a technology that doesn’t work? What if there was a way to stop all spam once and for all with zero false positives? And what if that paradigm didn’t rely on filtering at all?

That is where Sender Address Verification (SAV) comes in. SAV validates emails based on who sent them rather than trying to guess whether or not a message is legitimate or not. Once a sender has been confirmed as legitimate, all emails from that person go right to the inbox. It’s as simple as that. The reason SAV stops 100 percent of spam with zero false positives is because there is no guesswork involved—even the very best filters on the market can’t make this claim. Its entire model is based on guessing better than other folks, when the paradigm should be to completely eliminate guesswork.

SAV has been tested in numerous laboratories and has been proven to stop all unwanted emails from reaching the inbox. However, many of the technology product reviewers themselves do not believe in it! Why? Because they are welded to a fundamental belief in an approach (filtering) that their own research and testing proves doesn’t work! So when they stack up filters in order of quality, they miss the bigger picture: No matter how good the filter, it’s not doing a complete job.

As a result, companies overwhelmed with spam eventually get fed up and buy a new system that claims to catch more spam. But replacing a filter with another filter is the equivalent of griping that you did not get a nicer room on the Titanic, rather than wishing that you had taken a different ship. It’s a never-ending cycle of false promises followed by real disappointment, culminating in lost business or worse. In my opinion it is time for organizations to break the cycle once and for all by abandoning the failed filter paradigm in favor of something that actually works… Sender Address Verification is the paradigm shift.

Tal Golan is the founder, president and CTO of Sendio. A technology innovator since 1994, Golan is the email security expert and technology visionary driving the direction of Sendio’s product offerings as well as overseeing engineering, product management and technical development. Golan entered the high-tech industry working for the Multimedia and Digital Video Laboratory at Pixel Multimedia in Tel Aviv, Israel. Prior to founding Sendio, Golan founded OpticNerve, Inc., a software development and consulting firm developing enterprise-level Internet applications. At OpticNerve, he worked with many Internet industry pioneers, including Exodus Communications (now Cable & Wireless) and Netcom (now Earthlink). Golan is an expert in SMTP, Java, Linux, SQL, Cryptography and PHP, and has extensive experience as both an architect and implementer of Web-based applications.