Online Marketers to Stamp out Spam?

CodeHog writes "A group of online marketers want to get rid of spam and are proposing a registry base system for transmitting email. They are calling the project Lumos. Computer World has an aritcle on it Online marketers offer new antispam initiative . Doesn't it seem like these are the same businesses that profit from spam? Even better, this is being proposed by ESPC. The member list doesn't look too anti-spam to me." The obvious issue of course is that most spammers won't follow the rules anyway. My spam is up 20% over the 1st quarter of 2003! Yay!

Comments

This is not the way to stop spam

[bigberk]

New email registries will decrease spam? Set up by online marketers? No, sorry, I don't buy that at all. Remember what their interests are. The problem at hand is... most spammers don't care about creating inconveniences. They are like greedy undisciplined children, and won't stop spamming unless they are forced to (by law, vigilante retaliation, etc.)

To say something constructive now. There are two neat server side spam filtering projects I really like because neither uses IP-based blacklists (blacklists can bring a lot of collateral damage and require frequent judgement calls).

Spamprobe can be run from .procmailrc and uses a Bayesian scoring type of approach. It's a user-level solution which requires some training, but once it's accurate it's quite amazing. Currently it's missing only 3% of my incoming spam.

The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse also runs server side and uses fuzzy checksums to identify mail that is being received by a suspiciously large number of mail hosts around the world. A brilliant idea which works better than you may think. I have never seen a false positive with this system, and it misses about 1/4 of incoming spam. Effectiveness will improve as more hosts join the distributed checksum system!

ESPC

[mark_space2001]

The ESPC website is darn interesting, check it out. In particular, they have a mailing list on yahoo groups, ostensibly for people to complain about false positives by spam filtering software. Really, it's a way for spammers to communicate about filtering, but it's really interesting to go there and browse through the list archives, which are freely available. Any admins out there might be well served by checking up on this list periodically.

The ESPC website also has a box where you can add your email address and receive "information" from them about the ESPC itself, which I would *ahem* not recomend. ;-)