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MIT Spam Conference Conclusions
RT Alec writes "The 2003 Spam Conference has concluded, reports InfoWorld. (related read: abstracts of the conference discussions). I was unable to attend the conference, but it appears all that was discussed was filters (client and server). I think the key problem is ISPs that do not block egress traffic on port 25. If you need to send mail through a different SMTP server than provided by your ISP, the admin of that server ought to provide you with a means of using it with authentication on a port other than 25 (you do have permission to use that SMTP server, don't you?). It is not too tough to set up an SMTP server to require authentication, or at a minimum to run off a different port. I am suprised that this is never mentioned as a cure for spam. If just AOL blocked port 25, this could reduce spam by 50% (I base this figure on close examination of the headers of the spam I receive). I was pleased to see that Barry Shein, president of The World (a Boston based ISP) was included in the talks. I am not sure by the abstract (see link above) posted if he mentioned blocking port 25. In a recent interview he did not mention it."
While they started out with the bayesian algorithm described by Paul Graham they quickly discovered that the effectiveness of his algorithm tends to depend on the values of some quite sensitive tuning parameters and that diffrent people can get wildly differing degrees of success depending on their configuration and the types of spam/ham that they receive. Gary Robinson wrote an interesting critique of Paul's algorithm and helped the spambayes team incorporate his so-called chi-squared combining scheme (which apparently isn't bayesian at all) which doesn't seem to depend so much on 'magic' numbers and their testing framework showed that it works surprisingly well for both small and large sets of messages.
It's still under active development although most of the ongoing work is centered around the user interface components (POP proxies, Outlook plugins, etc...) whereas the actual spam classifier hasn't changed much in a while.
Well worth looking into if you're getting too much spam. Who isn't?
Send spam using AOL's e-mail client and your account is nearly-instant toast, thanks to automated rate-limiting software.
AOL set up rate limiting sometime around 07/98. Yes, it was THAT long ago. Note, as another poster has said, this wouldn't stop someone from using AOL as their ISP and connecting to another SMTP server for spamming purposes, but considering how slow (not to mention expensive) AOL-provided net access is, I doubt any real spammer would use it for even that.
Since most of the
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
As usual, nobody is reading the article, and hence everyone misses the real meat. Ignore the silly web-zine hack writers and just go here:
http://spamconference.org/
The talks are online.
Basically, it boiled down to "Spam is currently in a gray area legally, so let's legitimize spam in order to divide the spammers into legal spammers (who pay handsomely for the privilege)
I also kind of got the impression that he thought the rate for this should be prohibitively high (did he say something like a penny per message, or am I making that up?). The point being, to put a system in place so that you are ABLE to charge for it so the magnitude of the problem is more clearly discernable.
Barry also mentioned many other "features" of spam from an ISP's point of view, not the least of which is that naive people hold their own ISP responsible for the mail they get, which is sometimes pornographic and exposed to children. I don't think he was seriously suggesting ISPs should let this go and furthermore profit from it, but rather that, if they were authorized and able to charge for it, they could flip the spammer's economic model and improve relationships between ISPs and their clients.
If you are using windows, and outlook, you can install SpamNet, made by Cloudmark.
I had to stop using Eudora, because I had so many filters (400+) to kill my spam that it took, literally, 5 minutes for my mail to appear in my inbox, which, needless to say was very frustrating and annoying.
Anyhow, I have been using Spamnet for about 7-8 months and, depending upon the time of day that I check my email it correctly blocked between 60% - 95% of my spam.
For example, since it is a peer based spam detection system, so the more users that vote that email from a particular sender is Spam, the more likely you will get it blocked. Eventually, it maps out and makes blacklists based on overall stats.
The point is, I took 2 days off for Xmas and when I checked my mail on the 27th, it filtered out about 295 of about 300 spam messages.
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The best anti-spam method I've seen, bar none, is a friend of mine's opt-in method. His filters indicate the email addresses of people whose mail he's willing to accept, and dumps the rest in his spam folder.
I hope your friend isn't on a mailing list and ever wants help. If people reply directly to him, they may directly land in his spam folder. Ok, I'm exaggeriting, this can be solved with filters also.
A very annoying method people use is filters which auto-reply if your email is not in a positive list, giving you instructions how you should resend your mail.
You sometimes get these messages when replying to list-messages and cc'ing the original sender. Since I'm not on this world to accomodate these people's mail-filters, I just killfile them.