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."

Comments

What happens to the 1 mis-classified email?

[Thrymm]

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 :)

Re:1/25000

[stienman]

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

Here's how it probably works

[lokedhs]

I heard about this new technique before. Apparently it works trmendously well.

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.