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."
1 out of 25k is impressive, but what happens to these spam mails? Are they bounced back as an error "no user account found"? Or done like a blackhole where the spammer doesnt know if it reeached its intended recipiant? I like my SpamBayes :)
Most users of email are now treating it as a lossy messaging system, and the users themselves accept that some messages simply don't make it. Critical business is always followed up with a call.
-Adam
If you are sending something so critical then you shouldn't be using email. FedEx with signature required delivery and certified/return-receipt USPS mail exist for a reason.
The idea is that the mail server keeps a whitelist of "allowed" addresses which are always accepted. If a mail comes from an address which is not known, the mail server will reply with a "server unavailable, try later" error message. All real mail servers will try to send the message a little later (I don't know the exact time, but it's probably less than an hour. Someone else might know better).
The second time the remote mail server tries to connect, the server accepts the mail and adds the address to the whitelist.
However, mass mailers for spam don't do this but simply go on to the next address in the list if this happens. This way the spam message is filtered out.
Note that this method doesn't require any analysis of the actual content of the messgae, nor does it involve any manual actions from neither the sender nor the receiever. Currently it's porbably the best spam blocking method that exists.
(Presuming that wasn't a troll) That's a horrible, horrible solution. Viruses fake sender addresses, which means the faked address gets *loads* of these 'Please confirm' emails, clogging up another innocent mail server. Get it wrong, and you'll have two servers sending 'Please confirm' messages to each other until one screws up into a little ball and dies. I'm all for the War Against Spam, but this isn't the way - it just doubles the amount of emails.
Then you're stuffed anyway, because internet e-mail is not guaranteed.
It is difficult. We're swatting away a million of the damn things a week and still our users complain. They also complain when we get false positives. And when, next week, we turn on the system that lets them see what we have blocked that was addressed to them, they'll complain too.
I think the one solution they would find acceptable is for me to personally read every one of those million messages and mark it as good or bad. I hope our VP doens't read slashdot....
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Spelling doesn't work. The average computer user either can't spell or can't type and doesn't bother to use a spellchecker in email. I did small study on spell checking as an anti-spam tool and was somewhat disappointed by the results.
-- Will program for bandwidth