On Thu, 6 Mar 2003 20:29:14 -0800 (PST) Nate W wrote:
+------------------
| On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Alan DeKok wrote:
|
| > Some ad-hoc and naive solutions may work, if you're not receiving
| > appreciable amounts of spam. They may even work if you have money to
| > throw at the problem. But they don't scale. They're not permanent
| > solutions. And until we have a clear description/understanding of the
| > problem, it's a waste of time to talk about specific solutions.
|
| Maybe it would help to look at separate problems and their separate
| solutions?
+------------------
Email has several aspects. Two that I think are important to the
spam discussion are the volume aspect and the content aspect. Users
of email are more interested in the content aspect. While
administrators are more interested in the volume aspect.
Yes email users want to see a reduction in the volume of spam. But
the main problem they see is that their mailbox fills with stuff
that is of no relevance to them or is down right offensive.
Email administrators on the other hand are most interested in keeping
their infrastructure delivering service to their customers. And
Spam has grown to the level where just the raw traffic from mail
can bring down mail servers. That most of what is going through the
server is just going to be deleted by the end users or forwarded
to your "spam-concerns" address is just icing on the cake.
Attacking the volume aspect involves traffic blocking and campaigns
to close open relays and shut down temporary account spammers.
Attacking the content aspect usually involves classification and
sorting.
It is obvious that there is feedback between systems designed to
address volume and those designed to address content. And it should
also be obvious that the data that enables volume systems is also
useful as classification tags. And that higher level classification
can be used to refine the volume systems.
Maybe we can define some architectural models that can be used to
help understand the dimensions of a solution.
--
chris fedde
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