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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Paul's Mailfrom (Was: IETF SMTP Working Group Proposal at
> > In the fullness of time, the universe itself will die of heat. So what? > > How come this makes me want to raise the issue of our immortal souls? spammers have souls? > So for example saying this or that filter appears to have repelled 1M > spam msgs per day doesn't really prove much unless one can say with > some (preferably mathematical) confidence that it's actually reduced > spam not just caused it to flow around the filter. > > Put another way it'd be nice to know that a technical approach was > statistically superior to just shutting off SMTP for an hour per day > which would also block some amount of spam. Look! Not one single piece > of spam from 1AM-2AM (while we had our machinery all turned off.) i measure success by the fraction: rejected_spam / total_spam thus if i can reject 6000/10000 that may not seem better than rejecting 1000/4000 since i ended up dealing with 4000 received spams rather than 3000, but it actually does mean that my situation got better _compared_to_having_done_nothing_. (those are weekly figures for my own personal server; hotmail sees the same numbers in less than one second, which helps understand the importance of total rational impact rather than simple absolute unrejected volume.) (once postfix supports dcc i expect to see it change to 8000/10000, btw.) > Maybe there is no technical solution, of any value, possible (at the > system / DoS level, not talking about individual approaches like > whitelisting.) > > I'm quite serious. i know you are, but i think the better statement would be "there is not going to be a single long term solution, either technical or nontechnical." we're going to see a lot of point solutions, as each participant seeks to shift the costs of handling unwanted e-mail away from themselves. > My point is that I think we really need to start focusing on solutions > which aren't primarily or solely technical. the folks at http://spam.abuse.net/ and http://www.cauce.org/ and even http://www.spamcon.org/ would be alarmed to hear you say that they've been focused on purely technical solutions all these years.
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