[praptak]

Thank you, this post was good and informative. Nevertheless I think you missed his main point and concentrated on something that was merely incidental to it.

Yes, spam fighting is hard. Yes, it's probably easier with huge centralized installations (he actually observed that at this point the centralization offers advantages over the decentralized model.) But his main point was not about spam nor even about e-mail in general. His point was that it is worth putting the additional effort into making decentralized systems work. This is definitely not what Google are doing.

[mkr-hn]

I think Google could make a big difference by licensing an email antispam API like Automattic does with Akistmet. You'd get the best of both worlds.

[nuclear_eclipse]

They already do. Its called Postini, and some of the biggest corporations in the US already use it.

[rednaught]

Just an FYI, Postini was an acquisition. There are many companies that provide filtering,spam detection.

[jonknee]

Yes, they bought best of breed spam filtering technology and gave it way for free to the whole world. It was a great acquisition.

[rednaught]

Google charges for Postini's standalone service. Their integration of Postini's function into Gmail and it being "free" in exchange for some of your freedoms is the entire point of this discussion and the mailing list post.

[jonknee]

The OP said they should license it (the spam filtering portion specifically). They do. If you don't want to pay you can also use it for free. Simply put, I don't see his point.

[eitally]

Gmail doesn't use Postini for security/filtering. That's all Google/Gmail.

[mkr-hn]

That's neat. But it's also the first I've heard of it. Do they promote it outside of the business world? I get the impression that they don't think of it as something a CS department or non-profit would use.

[jonknee]

Have you looked for it? It's pretty tied in with their Google Apps offering which is where I've seen it, despite not being in the market for it.

It's no surprise that they concentrate on marketing their business software to businesses though. That's who's going to pay for it. A CS department is going to use whatever the school uses and a non-profit is better served by Google Apps (which is discounted heavily for non-profits).

[true_religion]

If a CS department is using it, they'd have it available through the university wide licence.

Also, 80beans is using it and they only have a team of 6.

[sunchild]

Postini is widely used. I wish Apple would slap it onto me.com. My Apple email is a spamfest.

[mrtron]

Regulated companies use Postini commonly for compliance reasons. Lots of big financial firms are customers.

[stevenbedrick]

I know of several non-profits using Postini as their anti-spam solution.

[shailesh]

ACM uses Postini.