[thelist] Serious antispam measures

Ken Schaefer ken at adOpenStatic.com
Mon Apr 19 20:23:40 CDT 2004


The drawback with Cloudmark is overzealous and/or clueless users who mark
things they signed up for as spam. And then, unless the sending company has
some kind of prior agreement with Cloudmark, all the other recipients will
find the newsletters etc, disappearing into their spam folders.

I don't want to put the system down. Nor do I want to dump on Bayesian
Filters (I use a spam assassin port running on my mailserver, and it nabs
>3,000 messages a day, which is fantastic). The problem is that none of
these solutions:
a) addresses the reason why we have so much spam

b) is really a long-run solution. Instead, it's more like a never ending
battle, a "cold war" arms buildup between the spammers, and the anti-spam
crowd. Given the various underhand tactics now being ascribed to spammers
(or hackers/crackers associated with spammers), the battle is going to
become a lot more nasty soon, and the anti-spam crowd might start being on
the losing side.

Personally, I think there needs to be a more fundamental reform of the
messaging infrastructure that fixes the spam problem. All these other things
are good, and should be used as additional layers of defense, but they're
really bandaids. If you look at all the really robust authentication
protocols out there (like Kerberos), you don't need these bandaids. They're
simple, and they work.

Cheers
Ken

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: "Adrian Gonzales" <adrian at clearspanmedia.com>
Subject: RE: [thelist] Serious antispam measures


: I don't believe that this has been discussed, but CloudMark has an
: awesome spam blocking system. It works on a peer to peer kinda network
: where everyone's clients report back to the sever with spam headers and
: then is disseminated through the network so it starts blocking everyone
: elses. In my experience with them they blocked almost every piece of
: spam.
:
: They have a sever version and a plug-in for Outlook. The personal
: version is a really cheap subscription based service, I'm not sure about
: the pricing on the server version though.
:
: You can see more here: http://www.cloudmark.com/
: They've even got a 30 trial.
:
: Adrian Gonzales Jr.



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