Slashdot Mirror
Revolutionary Spam Firewall Developed
psy writes "physorg has a story on a new spam firewall developed at The University of Queensland.
The new technology is the only true spam firewall in existence, according to co-developer Matthew Sullivan.
"Existing anti-spam software filters out spam whereas ours puts up a firewall, stopping all email traffic and only allowing real mail through," said Mr Sullivan.
"In addition, our technology is accurate and fast. We recently completed a successful trial of a key layer of the spam firewall and it processed the emails at 90 messages per second, misclassifying only one out of 25,000 emails."
"It turned out that the software was even better than us, picking up spam we'd incorrectly classified as legitimate emails."
Sourceode would be nice....
What the hell is one of these? There seems no substance to this report, bar some TLAs as above and a load of hype. Where is the proof? How was it tested? Etc.
Although this is a great new technology, for a business setting, I don't know if even missing one e-mail is acceptable...
Fetchmail + SpamAssassin?
What am I missing here?
Doesn't save B/W: you need to run in INSIDE your network.
Don't care how fast it is: It's a dedicated server.
1/25,000 failure rate with no false positives: OK, that's good. But still not amazing.
How are their servers?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
It's easy to produce these kind of results in trials - you just tune the spam filter to handle a certain set of emails, then you feed it those emails again and you get a near 100% success rate.
Heck, why not do it with a million emails? Makes better headlines that way.
I don't see how this is any different to SpamAssassin (the term 'Mail Firewall' is pure marketing bullshit. It's a spam filter. Get over it.) except I bet it costs a hell of a lot more...
Isn't "spam firewall" just a marketing term for "filter"?
Until there is a 0% fail misclassification rate such a method is useless. Filtering was one thing, if you misfiltered a message you always had the oppertunity of occasionally scanning your SPAM box and making sure everything was about penis enlargement and not about the meeting you have next week. However, with this method email is stopped and never delivered, thus your misclassified email is now gone- forever.
I'd rather get 5 extra spam if it meant I also recieved every real email.
transmission_err
"It turned out that the software was even better than us, picking up spam we'd incorrectly classified as legitimate emails."
Heh. Does anyone else see that as a good way to downplay false positives?
"Oh, good point, Computer. That email from my boss actually was spam. I didn't realize that until you mentioned it."
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Isn't "spam firewall" just a marketing term for "filter"?
Isn't "revolutionary" just a marketing term for any stupid new product?
Well, shoot, despite using the pre tag, it got hidden, anyway, an invalid tag might be randomly inserted into parts of words to make scans fail. So it throws off scanners and doesn't show up when rendered for the user.
I'd guess that if you put the firewall up against your average email user, the average user would shitcan legitimate messages at a much higher rate than the firewall thanks to the fact that the user can get frustrated while the firewall can't. I know my boss accidentally deletes mail from me at least 3 times per week because he's careless while mass-deleting spam in the morning.
Since the firewall functions based upon code rather than emotion and intuition, the firewall's error rate is going to look better and better against human error as it handles more and more mail.
Why is it anytime a filter is discussed, everyone starts yammering about "1 is too many" and in reality, a 1000 would still be fine.
email is an unreliable system, so dont expect it to deliver every message flawlessly to begin with.
i think people get all antsy about it, because they like to think their email is just soo damned important, arctic winds will freeze the entire planet if they dont get whatever lame useless email from their spouse/manager/cousin.
if it were that critical that the person absolutely must know that information, it's called a fucking telephone.
over inflated self importance.
I honestly think that we need an RFC for this so that idiots who can't spell can get a real error message back when their legitimate email gets rejected. At this point, all spammers would be forced to spell correctly and it would be difficult for them to get their point across without using obvious spam keywords like 'viagra'.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
For example, Mail Avenger allows you to filter spam based on network characteristics like SYN fingerprints and routes. It even integrates with the kernel firewall to filter out aggressive spammers and mail bombers. However, because it runs as an ordinary user-level process, it also has much more flexibility, for example allowing individual users to set different policies on different email addresses. What can a spam "firewall" do that you can't do with a system like Mail Avenger.
I understand a "spam firewall" to close the connection as soon as it recognises spam, rather then let the whole email download. In the case of those "Windows service pack" emails, you can save a lot of bandwidth.
The second time the remote mail server tries to connect, the server accepts the mail and adds the address to the whitelist. Currently it's porbably the best spam blocking method that exists.
Until the spammers catch on and start to resend their requests. This seems like a stop-gap solution.
They are celebrating false positives?
That's not a firewall either - it's a sandbox (and not new, either)...
The guy is not asking for a sandbox. He is asking for the ability to give or deny individual processes write-access to the hard drive. That's something quite different from a sandbox.
I would also be interested is software that does this.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Your typical Bayesian filter works on the message source, not the output of an HTML renderer. "viag<!--xyz-->ra" gets dumped into the spammy-word list along with "v1agr4" and other annoyances, so after the first one sneaks through and is manually classified, the rest are blocked.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Isn't slashdot supposed to be more than just a conduit for corporate press releases?
No matter how kind you are, German children are kinder.
All these phrasings automatically trigger my B.S. filter. Or should I say firewall.
One of the biggest problems with this proposal is that messages talking/warning about spam-such as this one-would get marked as spam.
It's already happened when I sent an email to a client warning about a porn dialer. The repeated mention of porn got my message spam-trapped.
What's needed is a filter that checks these words & spellings in context-but that's far more difficult than the simplistic spell checker that's proposed.
Isn't "marketing" just a term for people who don't know, selling to other people who don't know?
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
This is a very dangerous thing to do..
First, there are many languages to consider - and even if you've covered that, some people are writing using their dialect in emails (I've done this several times when writing in Swiss-German).
I think this only works for emails that are considered english and badly mispelled
your name is Dick? My father, whose name is Dick, has had endless trouble with spam filters blocking all of the messages he sends where he uses his own name, or when clients send him email using his name. It seems most filters and firewalls don't distinguish between "Dick" and "dicks," and this is a problem for businesses, where context is so important.
Only if the bayesian filter sucks. Or rather: Only if the tokenizer of the filter sucks. Bayesian filters don't have to treat the message as a raw string. They are free to parse it to, for example, remove comments, use image urls, or the difference between the foreground and background color in html mails as words.
You can make a tokenizer that not only treas a word written like this: 't.r.i.c.k.y', as the word 'tricky', but also as a "pseudoword" like 'trick:dottedword.' So the "bayesian part" of the filter would see these two words: 'tricky' and 'trick:dottedword.'
And there is of course loads of information that can be extracted from the headers of the mail.
The academic literature search is pretty much dead these days - there's just so much stuff going on in the world that it's well nigh impossible to be completely up to date on your field. There're entire communities of researchers that have no idea what other, similar groups are up to.
....and you must remember that chemists such as myself, will sometimes send an email to a colleague containing the systematic chemical name of a chemical which has just been synthesised for the first time. There is no way a dictionary based check would pass that, as we are effectively creating new "dictionary entries" each day.
Until the spammers catch on and start to resend their requests. This seems like a stop-gap solution.
It is, but it's a GOOD stop-gap. In order to resend the bounced greylisted message, you'd have to be resending ALL soft bounced messages the number of which, assuming you're sending millions of emails a day, is not insignificant.
It makes the cost of doing business higher for spammers, which ideally cuts down on their profits, making spamming less attractive.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
If the spammer gets a "try later" response, he tries later ONE TIME. Worst-case this doubles their bandwidth costs and delays everything by 4 hours.
Today, MOST bad addresses will get SOME OTHER reply, so the cost increase is 2x.
I agree that it's a GOOD stopgap measure but it will fail as soon as the spammers catch on.
On the other hand, spammers might catch on to the idea that "these people are likely to complain, so I don't want to mail them anyways." That would be a Very Good Thing.
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