The Road Less Traveled

We knew when we launched Qurb that it was going to be controversial. While most anti-spam solutions are trying to solve the problem of identifying spam by looking at the contents of the email Qurb just looks at the sender. If the sender's address in on your Approved Sender list, the mail goes to your Inbox. If the sender's address is not on the list, the mail is quarantined for later review. That's it. Pretty simple.

Anti-spam solutions like Qurb are typically classified as whitelists. Most whitelists that have been built so far haven't been very good. The day we launched we got ripped in a Wired article. Here is my favorite quote, from Steve Atkins:

"These guys are from AvantGo. They aren't stupid. So they may have something we haven't seen. I'm willing to wait and see, but I've seen (similar systems) come and I've seen them go, and they've all been bad."

This is classic rhetorical technique. First complement your opponent on something irrelevant. You don't want to be perceived as unfair, after all. Then slam them on point. Of course, Mr. Atkins hadn't actually used Qurb. Apparently when you're a "Spam Consultant" using the software you are commenting on isn't a prerequisite for getting a quote (and a link to your web site) in a Wired article.

Coming from AvantGo, we're comfortable playing the contrarian. In 1997 when we started the company the conventional wisdom was that high speed always-on wireless data was just around the corner. Billions of dollars were bet on this and almost all of the wireless start-ups starved to death when it didn't happen. We're now in 2003 and high speed always-on wireless data is just starting to become real. Today millions of people use AvantGo by syncing with their PC. Low-tech, but very effective.

The original Palm Pilot did less than Newton, General Magic, or Go. It did much less than your laptop. Why did it succeed? For some products features matter more than simplicity. For others doing one thing really well is what counts.

Qurb does one thing really well. It keeps all of the spam out of your Inbox. Our design goal was simple: Qurb had to be easier to use than the delete button. That's a high bar, but the people who use the product tell us we succeeded.

There are legitimate slams of Qurb 1.0, but I haven't seen them reported yet. Hopefully we'll ship 2.0 before they find them. If you've used a whitelist anti-spam solution and were unhappy with it, don't assume Qurb will have the same problems. Read about how Qurb works, and give it a try.