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."
Isn't "spam firewall" just a marketing term for "filter"?
Isn't "revolutionary" just a marketing term for any stupid new product?
One of two conditions exists in this case.
1) The e-mail is vitally important and your business will be seriously damaged by its failed delivery.
2) The e-mail was somewhat important, but not something large enough to materially change your revenue/profits.
If the first is the case, you probably shouldn't be using e-mail in the first place and/or whoever sent it is probably going to follow up with a FedEx or phone call.
In the case of number 2 (ha ha, number two), you've saved so much time not having to wade through spam that the losses are negated.
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.
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.
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.]
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.