The Next Step in Fighting Spam: Greylisting

Evan Harris writes "I've just published a paper on a new and unique spam blocking method called "Greylisting". The best thing about it other than achieving better than 97% effectiveness in blocking spam, is that it practically eliminates the main problem of other solutions: the false-positive. There's even source code for an example implementation written as a perl filter for sendmail, along with instructions for installing, so you can get up and running quickly."

Comments

ive done better

[Anonymous Coward]

ive invented pinklisting. i now just get all the good gay spam.

Re:your first mistake

[Schnapple]

You have just rendered Greylisting pretty useless by making it open source.

You're assuming the spammers can read source code.

Re:your first mistake

[L. VeGas]

That's just my take on the issue, maybe I'm wrong but I doubt it.

That's what I like to see. Someone with strong opinions. Or maybe not.

RFC 3514

[pizen]

How about in the spirit of RFC 3514 (the evil bit) we create a spam header in email. Spam will set this header so we can easily filter it out.

Re:My spam filtering

[McDutchie]

If a message contains the word "offer" it's toast.

Remind me never to offer you any friendly help with anything. :)

Waiting for Article Title

[notque]

The Next Step in Fighting Spam: Death Penalty

Re:your first mistake

[Horny Smurf]

So, the spammers themselves will be of significant help in debugging and helping to fix the code so they can't circumvent it, won't they? OSS means anyone who finds how the greylist script is beaten can figure out a fix and post it. Sounds like the best thing to do IMHO. Soko

So, once the spammers find how to get around the greylist, they'll submit patches to the spam blocking software?

The real solution

[mrseigen]

We should grab some of the guys who get 1000+ spams per day, point them to the physical location of the spammers, and then step back. I can guarantee you that vigilante justice is entirely appropriate here, considering we want the gov to step back from the 'net instead of entering new "secret arrests of spammers"(?) laws.

Re:Sarxpam

[selfabuse]

find the people who sent it, and send them a message saying "I'm Ron Jeremy... I don't think you *want* me to have another 3 inches"

Re:your first mistake

[Ross C. Brackett]

You're assuming the spammers can read.

Re:your first mistake

[autopr0n]

You're assuming the spammers can read source code.

Who do you think writes spamming software?

EOL SMTP

[satyap]

Or we could all abandon SMTP and move to my jabber-based email "solution".

What? Where is it? Oh, I'm still working on it. You can send and receive, but buddy lists are not implemented yet.