Top Ten Reasons Some People Stay with Home-grown/Open Source Email Filtering

Several of us recently returned from various hosting-oriented events, including Parallels EMEA Roadshow and cPanel in Texas. We talked to lots of people there that have developed their own homegrown solutions for email filtering, often based on open source; here are the top 10 reasons we heard for keeping their existing email filtering systems:

1. They love Spam about poorly written and badly spelled offers for sex, drugs, and that new PhD they wanted to get, but couldn’t be bothered to go to school for.

2. They simply can’t get enough of those cute viruses.

3. They love being interrupted during breakfast, lunch, and dinner to troubleshoot a customer’s infected computer that in the end they have to tell them to reformat anyway.

4. The happiest moment in their day is when a customer clicks on an .EXE file from someone they don’t know and then calls sounding genuinely surprised.

5. Their fingers get a great workout from the hours and hours of writing filter rules and adding people to the blacklist.

6. They still believe deep down that poor widowed Carlonia Jobabie Johnson from Nigeria will finally stop mourning the loss of her late husband/general/president/priest/doctor long enough to send the millions they helped her get.

7. Actually getting real work done is just plain boring.

8. They don’t mind spending most of your day sifting through thousands of their client’s inboxes to find that one email.

9. They have a bet with Joe in sales that this month’s server electric bill won’t be higher.

10. They get that warm and fuzzy feeling when clients call you to cancel and demand a full refund after 95% of their email is spam and/or viruses (they’re so silly what were they thinking).

And since this is not really a top ten list…NUMBER…

11. Watching the servers run above maximum, overheat, and crash helps them sleep at night.

OK OK – you want to read the top 10 reasons to SWITCH to commercial email filtering? There’s a real document you are welcome to download and share.