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Researchers Claim "Effectively Perfect" Spam Blocking Discovery
A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for. "The system ... works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content and how it should be varied. The team reasoned that analyzing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot."
Here's the final solution:
Quit letting grad students push their "New, amazing idea" about SPAM and have everybody implement a WHITELIST. Set it up so that email addresses are broken up into three groups during processing:
1) Known email addresses: filter into appropriate directories in your mail app.
2) Email addresses from known organizations: filter into appropriate directories. Maybe a friend of a friend?
3) Unknown email addresses. Filter into "trash". Once a day, scan your trash for anything interesting, save the good stuff and empty the rest. Whoosh.
Poof! Problem solved. But since Thunderbird already lets you do that, nobody's going to make any money, eh?