Spam is a big problem in today's Internet. A lot of companies are turning to professional mail-service companies in order to avoid being spammed to death. That's a good solution – or is it?

That depends.

Here is how those service-companies usually work. They use public DNSBL lists as well as proprietary filters that try to distinguish good from bad (= spam) mails. Whenever the company declares an incoming mail to be 'spam', it will be quarantined . A daily report of all quarantined mail is generated and forwarded to their respective clients. In a perfect world, the clients browse this list and pick which of those 'spam' mails should be re-qualified as 'good' and be made available for them.

All quarantined mail will usually be deleted after 30 days.

Unfortunately, we are not living in a perfect world. I am not browsing my spams, I just delete them every other week or so. That's what most people do. And that's the problem.

What happens, if, for whatever reason, your important mail is flagged as 'bad' by some proprietary filter at some mail-service? It goes on to the 'spam' list and, since nobody reads it, your mail is deleted after 30 days.

This wouldn't be a problem IF the mail-service would notify you about your dumped mail and the reason for dumping. But most don't do that. They silently discard the mail and that's that.

Once again: If I dump my spams, well, that's my decision. Not only am I using generally accepted freeware spam-mail filters, I am NOT a company providing mail-service for third parties.

I can't accept however, that professional service companies are claiming the right to decide whether or not to forward mail based on their filters decisions. They should know that a lot of their customers don't read their spam reports and they shouldn't be allowed to delete mails without sending notifications to the sender.

Now – I understand that they are handling hundreds of thousands of mails each day. Sending rejection reports to each and every spam-mail sender must be a big headache. But mail is their business. They can't just rely on their customers vigilance to read their spam reports and to pick one or two important mails out of possibly hundreds of real spams. They are entrusted with their clients communications and can't decide if an email is important or not.

This is why they need to notify senders if they dump any mail.

Unfortunately they don't do that.

No you know why that big company didn't answer your job application. They never saw it.

Cloud computing is the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them (Source: Wikipedia).

Now that sounds as if it would be something new. But it isn't. Once in a while, something like that pops up. 20 years ago, we used terminals to connect to IBM or UNIX servers which ran the applications. Unix's X-Windows system is still able to display the output of remote running programs on local displays. Ten or so years ago, we were told that we should run the applications on our local computers but to keep files and applications on LAN servers.

On a first glance, it looks promising. Nothing on local drives, all programs and data reside on remote servers. But it didn't really catch on. Why? Because it took some time to launch the programs, to load and to save data over the LAN, the licensing issue was a mess and the single server introduced a single point of failure.

Now it's cloud computing with the Internet providing the cloud. The promises are the same: Access to a great variety of software, remote data storage means no need for local backups. The lazy man's dream.

But think about it: No access to your data without Internet. Accessing programs will cost money, long(er) load and save times. And you must rely on other people to protect your data. And that is what T-Mobile's 'Sidekick' customers did. Some of them just lost their personal data because the data storage provider '>Danger' (a Microsoft subsidiary), didn't do backups (see report from >Engadget).

What is the value of one's addresses, calendar entries or photos? T-Mobile believes it is about US$ 100 - though not cash, but as a voucher to other services. What would you say if somebody loses your important data and says: Hey, sorry. Too bad. Here's a 100 Dollar. You can use that to buy other services from me.. What kind of service and security can one expect, if the provider values your data at 100 Dollars in, well, vouchers?

Other companies had problems too (like Google's Email-Services, Amazon), though they didn't lose any data.

If something sounds too good to be true - you know the saying. It is a headache to backup and to protect data. However - a nice big hard drive or NAS device costs less than a 100 bucks and allows you to copy all of your important files.

I personally would not entrust anybody with the safety of my data. It's just too important to me. I won't let any 'cloud' block the view of the sun.