Have you noticed how much worse spam filters are than they used to be?
Personal emails from people you’ve been happily emailing for years end up in the spam folder.
Important emails you send to people who really, really want to hear from you never arrive.
If you’re tired of sheepishly asking people to look in their spam folder, you may be wondering why spam filters are getting worse.
Well, here’s why.
Spoiler alert: it’s not that Google can’t write spam filters
Most email is handled by Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Together, these companies employ maybe 70,000 software engineers.
These engineers are paid anything from $100k to $1m a year.
They’re pretty good at what they do.
They’ve programmed augmented reality headsets, voice translators and self-driving cars.
They can certainly write spam filters that work.
Indeed, they already have.
Remember Gmail in the early days? Its spam filters were so good that they seemed like magic. 100% of spam went to the spam folder. 100% of non-spam went to the inbox.
It was so reliable that you never needed to check your spam folder.
What changed?
Short answer: it’s the incentives
Charlie Munger says: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
To understand the way Apple, Google and Microsoft work, you have to understand the way they make money.
Because, well, they’re businesses.
Regardless of whatever pretty words they put out there to persuade people that they’re in business to make the world a better place, the reality is that they’ll always do whatever they need to do to make more money.
Apple makes money by selling laptops and phones to you. That makes it a very different business from Google and Microsoft. Apple gets its money from you, which means that they’ll do what they can to please you.
Apple doesn’t give you email for free: you pay for it when you buy your iPhone and your MacBook Pro and your iCloud subsription.
This article is not about Apple.
Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, make money by selling software and services to other businesses. They get their money from those businesses, which means that they’ll do what they can to please those businesses.
Google and Microsoft give you email for free. They don’t make any money from you, directly, so they don’t do much to please you.
Case study: me and my accountants
Every year, I send an email to my accountants, with details of how I fared financially over the year, and a few spreadsheets attached.
Every year, it fails to arrive.
It’s blocked by the accountants’ spam filters. Microsoft, I presume.
So every time I send an email to my accountants, I have to follow up with a phone call, asking them to root through their junk folder to find it. It’s like being back in the 19th century. Hello? Operator? Operator? Hello???
It would be extremely easy for Microsoft to fix this problem. My accountants have sent me dozens of emails over the years. Microsoft’s software could take a look at this and think, hmmm, these accountants really want to communicate with Mark, so let’s not send his emails to the junk folder.
But Microsoft won’t fix the problem.
Why?
Show me the incentive.
Microsoft’s customer, when it comes to email software and services, is the Chief Information Officer at the accountants’ global headquarters. The CIO cares about security. The CIO does not care whether my emails get through.
If Microsoft changed its software to let my emails through, it’d improve my life, but I’m not Microsoft’s customer. Letting through emails from no-good nobodies like me looks to the CIO like a failure of security, and the CIO, remember, is Microsoft’s customer.
So Microsoft will never fix the problem.
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.
Case study: me and my customers
I run a small business called goodwoodglobes. I carve three-dimensional maps and globes out of wood.
Sometimes someone contacts me through my web site to ask about a wood-carved map of their local mountains. I spend a couple of hours making a preview of what the map might look like, and email it to them.
Who knows if it ever arrives?
Google’s filters have been increasingly routing emails to cryptically named folders, as well as to the spam folder.
How many people know that the “Promotions” folder is for email they’ve asked to be sent? It sounds like a folder full of Google ads, so many people never think to look there.
At the whim of an algorithm, a couple of hours of my time are wasted, and my potential customer never gets to see the map they requested.
Why?
Here’s a clue: neither I nor my customer pays Google a penny.
What does Google care if a couple of hours of my time are wasted?
What does Google care if my potential customer never gets to see the map they requested?
Show me the incentive.
Google’s customers, when it comes to email software and services, are bigger businesses than goodwoodglobes. These big businesses pay Google big money for the same email, more or less, that individuals get for free.
Google can write spam filters that work 100%. I know they can, because they did, back in the early days of Gmail, when it was a new product pitted against Microsoft’s email offerings.
Google doesn’t write spam filters that work 100% any more, because it’s not their paying customers who suffer from excessive filtering, it’s smaller businesses like mine, and individuals like my customers.
This over-zealous spam filtering makes it impossible to start anything new on the web.
This, of course, is the whole point.
Microsoft and Google don’t want individuals to start anything new, at least not at their own domain names on the open web.
Instead, they want everyone to start things on LinkedIn and YouTube, at their domain names, on their closed platforms, so that they can capture as much value from it as they can, value that might otherwise inexcusably accrue to those individuals.
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.
Case study: me and my friends
My personal emails to my friends and my family have been increasingly ending up in their spam folders recently.
Their personal emails to me have been increasingly ending up in my spam folders.
These are people with whom I’ve maintained an uninterrupted email correspondence for months, or years, or decades.
There is nothing in the emails that would suggest that they might be spam: no images, no links, nothing but the same chit-chat we’ve always exchanged.
Why are Google and Microsoft so determined to cut short relationships that have lasted a lifetime?
Well, obviously, our relationships don’t contribute to Google’s or Microsoft’s bottom line.
Hey, here’s what to do about it
Spam filters are getting worse because neither Google nor Microsoft has any incentive to make them better.
As is so often the case, innovation will come not from these incumbents, but from upstarts who challenge them.
Sign up for email from Hey, the new email service from Basecamp, and “the first time someone emails you, you get to decide if you want to hear from them again”.
If my accountants used Hey, when I emailed them, they’d see my name pop up, and they’d tell Hey: we know Mark, he’s a client of ours, we want to communicate with him!
If my customers used Hey, when I emailed them with the preview of a wood-carved map of their local mountains they’d requested, they’d see my company name pop up, and they’d tell Hey: I know what this is, I asked for this email, don’t hide it from me!
If my friends and my family and I used Hey, we’d have told it months or years or decades ago that we want to receive emails from each other, so we’d never have our relationships cut off by an algorithm.
Simple solution, right?
So why won’t Google or Microsoft adopt it?
You and Charlie Munger both know the answer.