On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Roland wrote:
But the solution sought here should prevent unsolicited mail at
the sender. You cant do this with content-scanning and it will
take at least 10 years to become usable for a sales(_at_)-address
which is too worried about loosing business from a misconfigured
or not-updated potential client.
No, that's not true. There's something totally obvious that many people
in the computer field overlook:
Human brainpower
It is my contention that no technological solution will solve the spam
problem, at least not to a high degree of satisfaction. The best we
can do is come up with tools that make people as efficient as
possible, and then leave the final decision up to a person.
Think of paper mail: Many corporations filter paper mail for their top
executive through clerical staff who perform triage. The clerical
staff's time is comparatively cheap and it makes sense to have people
perform this duty.
Now transfer that analogy to e-mail. A system that performs
first-pass automatic sorting gets you 90-98% of the way there,
depending on its sophistication. It makes sense to have clerical
staff spend a few minutes a day going through the remaining
questionable e-mail.
It's (probably) no secret that my company sells anti-spam tools, and
this is our approach. A broad-spectrum of technological approaches,
with the final decision being made by a human. Of course, that human
can grant the automatic processes some decision-making power; there's
a risk/efficiency tradeoff that we leave up to our customers.
This scheme works really well for corporations, but, alas, not so well
for individual end-users. Nevertheless, allowing a tradeoff between
automation and human intervention is, IMO, the best solution for the
forseeable future.
If we change e-mail protocols so that spam becomes impossible, we'll
change the whole nature of the medium that makes it so attractive in
the first place. For every "abusive" trick performed by a spammer,
there are legitimate uses for that trick.
--
David.
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