• by Ross Fadner , July 21, 2004

A new Return Path study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, reveals that most corporations employ a variety of spam-filtering techniques, not just one. This finding indicates that B2B e-mail marketers have more than one hurdle to overcome before their messages reach the intended inbox.

The study found that 61 percent of corporate systems administrators use some form of commercial filtering application, 49 percent write their own filtering rules (specifying message weight, attachments, message type, and certain keywords and phrases), 37 percent maintain private blacklists, and 34 percent use public blacklists.

Corporations are not only using a wide variety of spam-filtering techniques, but they are also writing their own, making it more important for corporate e-mailers to monitor delivery, wrote George Bilbrey, vice president and general manager of Return Path Deliverability Services. He said that, "anything less than constant vigilance will lead to delivery issues," as blacklist analysis is even trickier at the corporate level.

The report also found that nearly half (47 percent) of those surveyed configure their filtering applications or appliances at a level more stringent than the detail settings; just 29 percent use the default settings. Incidentally, a quarter of respondents used Symantec technology, while the rest of the field was far more fragmented.

In conjunction with the study, Return Path officially unveiled an expansion of its Spam Filter Monitor. Bilbrey said the new version of Spam Filter Monitor was the direct result of the Forrester study. He also said that it provides broader protection for B2B marketers, expanding its filter tracking and monitoring tools to give marketers "context and actionable information" about why an e-mail was blocked.

Return Path's technology scans about 60 percent of the fragmented filtering software landscape, according to the Forrester study. The July 2004 Corporate Spam Filter Monitor Industry Study surveyed 168 information technology professionals in North America.