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."
I have a simple algorithm to reject spam: spelling.
If you can't spell correctly, then I don't want your v1agr4.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I think Barracuda Networks would rather disagree with the idea that this is the "only true spam firewall in existence," considering that Barracuda's entire product line consists of spam firewalls.
Damn fine spam firewalls, too, I might add. They handle around 115 messages per second, and can run up to eight filtering steps (including Bayesian analysis, which is similarly efficient to SVM, which the one in the article uses). Plus Barracuda's can do virus scanning.
I'm not sure how this is revolutionary.
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
"...companies losing valuable employee time to deleting spam..."
/.ed, here:3
Maybe they should be working on a Slashdot-Firewall. Damn, I really should get back to work.
Oh, and since the linked article got
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.phtml?article=583
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.
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.
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