Asynchronous Programming for Spam Elimination

ttul writes "Stas Bekman (formerly the maintainer of mod_perl) has been quietly building an asynchronous programming framework to build high performance network applications in Perl. His recent Perl.com article describes how he has used the Event::Lib module (that lives on top of the popular libevent library) to write a traffic-shaping email proxy to get rid of spam. Asynchronous programming is challenging at the best of times. Read on to find out how to do it the easy way in Perl."

Comments

Not ultimately a solution

[frenetic3]

so they wrote an asynchronous proxy that slows down connections. cool trick, but not any kind of scalable solution.

the core assumption, and the only thing that makes this work, is that botnet spam software will _always_ just give up after 30 seconds; if this throttling technique ever became commonplace, spammers would just write their own asynchronous mailer -- it's not THAT hard. windows has the same kind of async networking support (either through the winsock API and/or IO completion ports, or what have you) and i'm sure the spam/botnet software authors have no qualms about holding open a couple thousand sockets on the rooted windows machine (times a few hundred thousand machines.) furthermore, i bet there are some shitty legitimate MTAs that would just give up too, causing actual mail to get discarded :)

(that, and they shoulda used twisted or something :) -- using a pool of apache/mod_perl instances to handle connections is grossly inefficient.)

ok, ok, maybe this sounds overly critical. it's a clever, thinking-out-of-the-box idea, but certainly not the panacea we're looking for to stop spam.

-fren