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Spam Trap Claims 10x-100x Accuracy Gain

Posted by kdawson on from the see-it-when-i-believe-it dept.

SpiritGod21 writes in with a NYTimes article on a new approach to spam detection that claims out-of-the-box improvement of 1 or 2 orders of magnitude over existing approaches. The article wanders off into human-interest territory as the inventor, Steven T. Kirsch, has an incurable disease and an engineer's approach to fighting it. But a description of the anti-spam tech, based on the reputation of the receiver and not the sender, is worth a read.

4 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yet another wrong answer... by Jimmy_B · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Except that this ignores the truth behind the spam problem, that many people don't seem to care about. Spam is, at its root, an economic problem. Spam is sent by people who are making money helping someone sell something. The spam you got this afternoon for discount v!@gra or 0EM software is making money for someone. And as long as someone can still make money off of it, they'll keep doing it.
    Not exactly. It's making money for the spammer, but it probably isn't making money for the person who hired him. You see, even if no one ever bought anything advertised in spam, it would still be sent. The problem is multilevel marketing, which creates a lot of people desperate to sell unsellable inventory, some of whom pay spammers to advertise it for them. A perceived economic incentive is enough, even if there isn't a real one.
  2. Re:Yet another wrong answer... by penix1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...and get very few opt-outs and many reactions.


    I can imagine the reactions you get...

    There are two reasons for this. First, nobody is receiving your emails because you are blocked nine ways to hell in their spam filters. Second, because most spam (yours included) use the opt-out crap for email verification of their lists. They know they have a live one so most sane people ignore opt-out links in email since they are dangerous.

    what needs to be changed *IS* the opt-out crap. It needs to be confirmed-opt-in plain and simple. While they are at it, I wouldn't say no to outlawing email harvesting either. Throw in a $10,000.00 fine for each violation of either provision and call it pretty. Make half the fine go to the organization that hunts down violators and we got a sound business solution.
    --
    This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
  3. Re:No by arth1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, that's not what they're saying at all. RTFA, please, cause you're describing something completely different. (And moderators too, please at least skim TFA it before moderating, because modding this "Informative" is bollocks.)

    This is a system where they look at the history of who a person has sent e-mail to. If the sender has a short term history of sending e-mail to people who mostly receive spam, the e-mail is considered more likely to be spam. Conversely, if the sender has a short term history of sending email to people who don't receive much spam, the email is considered unlikely to be spam.
    It's not about your inbox and its percentages, it's about the ratio of the inboxes the sender has previously sent to.

    "Because ratings are based on the most recent 25 emails for each sender, the system reacts instantly to spam attacks, usually within just a few messages."

    The system has one big flaw, though -- it only work with static senders. A spammer who changes the envelope from address won't get caught, and might even by luck pick a forged sender address that has a positive latest-25-score.
    So the solution for the spammers to defeat this system is to send the spams multiple times to the same receipients, but with different senders. This will increase the overall spam, which I don't see as a good service.

  4. Re:Ummmm.... by doom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First they can ensure that the message itself doesn't contain any recipient info (a big bcc basically).

    How exactly is a message supposed to get somewhere if it doesn't have the recipient info? I think you're confusing what you see in your mail box to what the mail servers see.

    In any case, as is typical the news article doesn't really provide enough information to determine how the system actually works. It does sound like it's working on the premise that since spam is done in "bulk", if you see lots of identical messages going through a server you can assume that that's spam. The obvious problem would be that spammers can include randomly generated content.

    But that problem is so obvious, it seems likely to me that I don't understand the system they have in mind.