IBM today released a free download of a new spam filtering tool, FairUCE (Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail), which it admits is not a full-fledged solution but a technology foundation that could one day reachthe marketplace.
Big Blue released the product under its AlphaWorks program in which technology innovations are distributed to developers who sign up as early adopters.
Analysts were underwhelmed.
Nothing New
“From what I can tell, there’s nothing really new here,” Lydia Leong,principal analyst at Gartner, told TechNewsWorld.
Jonathan Penn, principal analyst, Forrester Research, agreed. “To me, this looks like something IBM tried to develop into a product and didn’t see the value, so it is throwing it out the alphaWorks door towhoever wants to play with it,” he told TechNewsWorld.
FairUCE works by trying to identify the e-mail sender and decide whether ornot the mail is legitimate by checking its IP address against those of knownspammers, and uses algorithms to pick out IP addresses that are not yetlisted. This approach, IBM said, allows it to figure out which addressesfrom an ISP or other large domain are legitimate and which aren’t.
Return to Sender
When the software finds that a server is sending spam, it bounces themessages back to the originating server in the hopes of slowing it down. IfFairUCE cannot determine whether the mail is spam or not, it sends achallenge response back to the sender.
“Challenge response eliminates a lot of spam, but creates a lot of inconvenience,” Leong said.
Penn does not like challenge-response systems at all.”Not only is it a pain for legitimate people to have to comply with, butlegitimate newsletters get caught in the trap. In other words, it has a highfalse-positive rate,” he said, adding that spammers have already devisedways to fool these systems.
Good Products Exist
Neither Leong nor Penn saw the purpose of the release.”There are tons of pretty good vendors and products that people can beusing,” Leong said.
“The current leading products and services are doing a fine job of stoppingenough spam and making the rest easy to manage. We see lots of contentedcustomers,” Penn said.
IBM tied the release to research it did that found that 76 percent of alle-mail sent during February was spam. IBM also said one in 46 e-mails wasblocked because it contained some type of malware. IBM said that in January 83 percent of messages were classifiedas spam.
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