Death of “Spamnet”: Cloudmark DesktopOne will be dscontinued

 What a pity.
   Spamnet, in 2002 called “DesktopOne” by Cloudmark – and  free of charge since 2014 – is a fine anti-spam plugin for Outlook.
It will stop functioning after December 1, 2017.
It uses collaborative peer-to-peer filtering (»auf Gegenseitigkeit«). Desktop one works with Outlook or Thunderbird, as well as with Apple mail.
   When you mark a mail as spam and “Block” it – see screenshot above – it’s not only moved into your spam folder, also a message is sent upstream to Cloudmark with a summary of the spam’s content. If many users suggest a certain mail to be spam, Desktopone removes it from all future recipients into spam. The “summary” or hash code or signature – whatever you call that – of the spam mail is a company secret, so no spam author can circumvent this democratic way of filtering.
   As an example please read a review by Vic Lennard of January 14, 2013: “Every time a spam message appears in an inbox and the user clicks the Block button, information is sent to Cloudmark that identifies the message as spam. Once a level threshold has been exceeded, the message is filtered for all users. With over two billion (Milliarden) Cloudmark users worldwide, such a community-based approach yields powerful results.”
   Here what Cloudmark tells us very clearly: “We are sad to announce that Cloudmark DesktopOne is being discontinued and that the end of life wind down period has begun. With the increased use of mobile devices, the number of people running DesktopOne has tailed off over time as people migrated from desktop-based email clients to web-based and mobile-based email clients. As of 2014, we changed the Cloudmark DesktopOne product from that of a paid yearly subscription model to that of a free model in an effort to retain or increase the active user count. Unfortunately, this experiment hasn’t altered the rate of user decline. Although Cloudmark DesktopOne has been a helpful product for many users around the world, we are unfortunately no longer able to maintain the product and it will stop functioning after December 1, 2017.”
   So: It’s the fault of
• popular web-based online mailers, and
• smartphones with their proprietary mailers
   In our case here T-Online has a very uncritical spam filter, plus it adds ads in between mails on a smarttphone.

Read about Cloudmark and its origins in Wikipedia.
Look at their website, see the directors George Riedel, Eric Byunn, Greg Goldfarb, Robert Huret, Cameron Myhrvold, Janet Perna and Ian Perry.

Thank you, Cloudmark!

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