Spam Trap Claims 10x-100x Accuracy Gain

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.

Comments

Re:Yet another wrong answer...

[Jimmy_B]

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.