Anti-Spam Router -- opinions?

Tue Apr 6 09:23:34 UTC 2004

>which is why many of us have fought so hard against bad solutions.  the
>baynesian filtering crowd is the worst.  it's like treating every illness
>with antibiotics... what you end up with is a lot MORE illness in the
>medium to longer term, due to antibiotic-immune mutations.

Any content analysis that can be done to classify content can
be defeated by building a content generator that builds content
to meet the criteria of the analysis tool.

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 we change the email system architecture so that every
node in the architecture only accepts mail from known
sources and enforces a pre-arranged behavior pattern,
then we can clean up this mess. It makes sense to accept
large quantities of inbound email from aol.com, i.e. the
large flows are acceptable behavior in that instance. But 
it does not make sense to accept large quantities of inbound
email from a broadband customer. It also does not make sense
for a site with a large inflow of mail to accept mail from
all and sundry. It does make sense for them to prearrange
mail exchange with their 100 or 200 or 1000 largest mail
exchange partners and force everyone else to deal with
one of those partners. This is called adding hierarchy to
build a scalable solution. It's called spreading the load. 
It's called sharing the pain. And it is not something that
can be avoided as we now see. Everyone is sharing the pain
alright but it is the spammers who are choosing how much
and when it hurts. I guess it's a case of pay me now,
or pay me later...

--Michael Dillon