"Colleague spam" is the buzz word anointed by the Wall Street Journal for those wasteful messages from people who hit REPLY TO ALL without a good reason and for those announcements that a fresh batch of brownies are available in the lunch room. (Of course, in my office, new home-made brownies are a priority.) The Journal reports that people are in pain from all this mail. The result are new start-ups creating software products with prices as high as $90 that run on your PC ("client-side").
But, is it new? Or, have we come full circle?
Several years ago, there were two excellent client-side internal spam filters. Ella from Open Field Software and InBoxer both used statistical models to prioritize messages. Both products scanned your internal email folder and built a custom model for what you want to read and both learned from what you kept or deleted. Yet, both products became positioned as spam filters because the world was worried about those V1a*aRa advertisements.
A relatively unknown company, Permessa, has a server-based system that can actually block excessive use of reply-to-all. It does not create personalized models, but it does stop the problem at the source.
I am thinking that InBoxer should relaunch the InBoxer Anti-Spam Filter for dealing with colleague spam. Any interested investors?
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