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Analyzing AT&T's Anti-Anti-Spam Patent

Posted by simoniker on from the oddness-abounds dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Dan Gillmor is reporting in his eJournal taken, in turn, from Gregory Aharonian: AT&T has apparently been awarded a patent for circumventing certain spam filters, thereby providing slimeball spammers with yet a bigger hammer!" The patent covers "A system and method for circumventing schemes that use duplication detection to detect and block unsolicited e-mail (spam.)", although it's unclear exactly what AT&T want it for.

4 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PRECISELY! by fishbowl · · Score: 4, Informative

    Looking at my inbox, they appear to be mainly in Korea. I don't think AT&T has much litigation influence there, but I could be wrong.

    --
    -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
  2. Re:Hey! Shortsighted people! by GammaTau · · Score: 5, Informative

    Has it occured to anyone that by patenting an anti-anti-spam technique, AT&T can legally forbid spammers from using that technique?'

    If the technique is well-known and utilized prior the patent as well as extensively discussed in public forums (like nearly all ways of bypassing the spam filters are), then the patent can be nullified. In other words:

    • If the spammers have been using this patented method, the patent is void
    • If the spammers haven't been using this patented method, the patent has very little effect on spam
  3. Wrong numbers by Betcour · · Score: 5, Informative

    Those numbers are very wrong. Spammers count returns in sales per MILLION emails, because the rate is so low. It's profitable because they send huge quantities of spam, so even a very low sale rate is quite profitable.

    On the other hand real email marketing (done by a well known legitimate business, targetted to specific peoples who agreed to receive it) can get much better results.

  4. useless patent by geoff+lane · · Score: 3, Informative

    having actually just read the patent it would appear to be useless as it describes a means of avoiding a rather poor spam detection mechanism which I've never actually seen deployed.

    Modern spam detection which uses statistical methods applied to the spam content would be unaffected by the techniques described in the patent.