Jonathan Gennick at O’Reilly receives a piece of “honest spam“.
A friend comments on his spam experience:
I saw your posting re spam. FYI, I *loved* Brightmail
(http://www.brightmail.com). They used to have a free service for
individuals. I would have paid $10 per month. It worked great. They try to
get onto as many spam lists as possible, and use the resulting spam as input
to their spam-detection system. They also have a staff of people that do
some mannual stuff–I’m not sure what. But the results are excellent. Now,
the only way one can get it is if your email is hosted at one of their ISP
licensees.
It’s too bad that BrightMail dropped their consumer direct service in favor of focusing on big sales to ISP’s. I can hear the board meeting comments by venture investors where I suspect this decision was reached!
I can see not offering the free service — but, as my friend also remarks, I’d be willing to pay a modest fee to be relieved of the bulk of the spam hitting my inbox. My ISP and email accounts are totally separate anyway — I don’t even use the email service provided by my primary ISP!