Microsoft Researchers on Stopping Spam

TheBackBencher writes "Scientific American today has a very interesting article about "Stopping Spam" by Joshua Goodman, David Hackerman and Robert Rounthwaite from Microsoft Research. They talk about different types of spam -- spam with emails, spam on IMs, spamlinks on web pages and image based spam. They mention different techniques for spam filtering mainly fingerprinting matching techniques, n grams model, naive bayesian approach, optical character recognition, challenge/response systems and Human Interacted Proofs (HIP) in a very lucid style. They however do not mention fingerprinting approach of using Nilsimsa Hash to tackle addition of random words by spammers in emails or hypertextus interruptus technique used by spammers of splitting words using HTML comments, pairs of zero width tags, or bogus tags. Also, Spam-Research is reporting the SplitFit Technique that Spammers are using to fool Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard."

Comments

The way to stop spam...

[John Seminal]

Legislate against spam. As long as spam is legal, or the penalties against it are too low, or it is too easy to do, people will continue to try and make a quick buck.

Also, force all ISP's to monitor how much bandwith a source has. If you get too much usage per day, say 200 megabytes or more, then that person has to explain why they need that much bandwith. If someone gets the RIAA on board, with their lobbyists, that should pass very quickly.

Also, force all email to have some element which identifies the source. Not just a header that can be forged, but something that can't be hacked. And if a source can not be found, but it is selling a product an identifiable site, charge that site just as if they were the ones sending the spam.

A penny an email will keep the Spammer Away

[raga muffin disco]

A very simple way to stop spam would be to charge someone a small amount of money for example a penny for every email that is sent. That amount will go to the person who is receiving the email. Thus for every email that you send you need to pay a penny and for every email you receive you get a penny. Thus the total cost of sending an email will be zero if whoever you wrote to writes back to you. This will even out the cost of sending and receiving emails. The only person who this would hurt is the spammers who send out millions of emails to total strangers who most often just delete the junk that they receive. So this solution is good for people who use emails for legitimate reasons. Heck this way spammers can send me all the emails that they want, I will just be making money off of them.