North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Anti-Spam Router -- opinions?

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Tue Apr 06 11:05:18 2004

On 6 Apr 2004, at 05:23, [email protected] wrote:

To succeed against the spammers we need to IGNORE the content
and target the behaviors. Why does your mail server accept
incoming email from unknown and unauthenticated sources?
Why does your mail server allow your customers to relay
more than a few messages a day without special permission?
If the behaviours were easy to identify, there would be no spam.

My mail server accepts incoming e-mail from unknown and unauthenticated sources (a) because there is no widely-deployed mechanism to recognise or authenticate sources such that good ones can be distinguished from bad ones and (b) because the same sources are frequently responsible for sending spam and non-spam.

How do you distinguish between a home user sending twenty legitimate, real messages per day, and a home user whose PC has been 0wned, and which is sending twenty illegitimate messages per day?

The behaviours will adapt to defeat any attempt at classification. The content is the only thing which reliably identifies messages as spam, and the only way to classify the content with high confidence is to have the recipient read it and decide whether she is glad she received it.

I have now exceeded my self-imposed mailing list threshold of 0 messages about spam per month.


Joe