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Analysis of Spam, and a Proposed Solution

Posted by michael on from the enlarge-your-knowledge-now dept.

2bot_or_not_2bot writes "Spam: The Phenomenon is a detailed analysis of spam: products, scams, viruses, obfuscation methods, etc. Failed, and doomed-to-fail, methods of blocking spam are described. A general solution is proposed that does not: invade privacy, perform wide censorship or blacklisting, or involve payment and cooperation with corporations (beyond the transport and storage of data)." Hmmm.

4 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. Boycott of Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a boycott occurring for Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail. They're asking for anyone developing a mail client, spam filter or mail transport agent to use a more open protocol, rather than a patented one.

  2. Wrong by JohnGrahamCumming · · Score: 5, Informative
    From TFA:
    Salting the message with random words thwarted Bayesian filtering.
    No, it hasn't. That's utter nonsense. This entire article is filled with statements like this with no justification. How about reading my presentation at the MIT Spam Conference that showed that random word insertion did not fool POPFile (or other Bayesian filters).

    John.

  3. Have the users pay for it... by Vexler · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is another way of looking at it: Spammers exist because there are idiots out there who fall for "vicod1n" or "pen1s enl@rgement" or what have you. We should have users who are purchasing these products pay an additional "spam tax" on it, to compensate for the wasted bandwidth and so on. Sort of like "shipping and handling fee". Actually, it comes close to the Internet tax idea that Congress is punting about, but applied to spams.

  4. Bandwidth and storage for the ISP by RT+Alec · · Score: 5, Informative

    I administer a mail server for a small ISP. The problem with filtering on the user's end is that my costs are consumed by the time the user deals with the spam. I don't think, as the article suggests, that spammers will slow down if their message is not being read, in fact they will just spew out ever more spam. If a 1/10 of 1% hit rate does not deter them, a smaller hit rate won't either.

    I have to put some upper limit to the amount of storage I can give each person (right now I allow 100M, which I think is quite reasonable). But if a user goes on vacation and does not check their e-mail for a month, they could have their inbox filled with spam and viruses (not much difference these days, from a server admin point of view). This will preven legitamate messages from coming through. Therefore, I use the following technical measures to help reduce spam:

    • RBLs: dnsbl.njabl.org, sbl.spamhaus.org, xbl.spamhaus.org, and dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net
    • SPF:Sender (not adopted widely yet, but it does block a few messages a day even now)
    • Blocking specific subject lines (during virus outbreaks this can help)
    • Blocking mail "from" non-existant domains
    I really have no choice, I cannot afford not to take these measures. I explain all of them to my clients, nobody has had a problem yet. These measures catch roughly 75% of spam and viruses, and as far as I know, no false positives.