First Contact is the sales process milestone where the potential customer acknowledges their interest and identifies themselves. Most commonly, this could be through an email, a telephone call or some automated form on the website.

For the small business, defined in this report as those organizations employing less than 100 employees, email is the First Contact method of choice. This is consistent for larger firms too and is due largely to the great time-shifting convenience of email: I send at my convenience, and you send at yours.

Of course, if the First Contact email were to be intercepted by the anti-spam technology, the users' experience will be greatly affected and the customer will think less of the potential vendor who may never know that they had lost an opportunity, or even why. In this case, ignorance may be bliss, but it sure is a waste of resource.

Respondents did report greater frustration with their emails being trapped than being challenged. Earlier Brockmann & Company reports showed that challenge-response technologies are responsible for much higher levels of user satisfaction with email, and in First Contact circumstances.

The User Experience with Filter Appliance Report presents findings of users of filter appliances. The average Spam Index, the standard deviation of Spam Index and the percent of users that are Very Satisfied with their email experience are compared with the results for challenge-response users.

As well, this report contrasts several features of filter appliances with challenge-response systems. Clearly the gap between the expectations placed on spam filters and their actual performance as measured by the users of these products is large. The analysis of content is not as effective as simply following email handling workflow rules.

Other key findings include the observation that filter appliances by design consider every message, from every source suspect. They also regularly trap good email and deliver spam leakage to users. Users waste more time checking filter folers for good email and deleting spam from inboxes than other technologies.

Clearly, filter appliances are not effective according to measurements by users represented in the Spam Index. Appliances are out-matched by challenge-response technologies in three features as measured by the users who use them - average Spam Index, standard deviation of the Spam Index which measures variability in the Spam Index, percent users very satisfied with their email experience.

This report also compares the features of filter appliances and challenge-response systems.

This report review top findings of hosted filtering service users' email experience. Since the acquisition of Postini by Google in the summer of 2007, the hosted filtering service category has gained some caché among IT departments frustrated with managing their own email filtering implementations. This report shows the level of user experience, as manifested in the Spam Index, the variability in that experience and the overall users' satisfaction with their email experience.

This report compares the Spam Index results for users of hosted filtering service and compares them against the experience of challenge-response technology users. Statistics around Average Spam Index, Standard Deviation and Very Satisfied with the email experience are compared.

This report review top findings on users' email experience in the telecommunications, Internet, VoIP, wireless and cable services markets. Email is the most important communications application for this industry yet the users experience is not very satisfying. How best to characterize the users' issues and challenges?

This report shows the Spam Index results for these users as compared to nearly 500 other business email users.