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Re: [Asrg] 2.c.1 and 6 - The importance of being Earnest

2003-04-10 13:42:24
At 8:22 AM -0200 4/10/03, Kurt Magnusson wrote:
these URL's and phone numbers and shrunk my indata to ca 1500 entries, but it got far more effective. From ca 20 spam a day, to 1 (always a completely new, due to spammers address trading). And all I am using a simple, own procmail-like filter, just regex:ing the incoming mails for the URL/phone nos. I suspect we have not seen the forest for all the trees. Using "earnest" data, makes all filtering simpler, faster and more reliable.

I agree that it's a good filtering technique. However there are an infinite number of email addresses and web urls. Plus there are many many ways to encode those, making the filtering process time consuming unless it takes place on the end-user machine. It is also a reactive solution. Spam gets through until someone someone adds the new data to the database. And that has to be a manual process. Spammers frequently include links to legit sites in their spam--you don't want to accidentally blacklist those. Finally, there's a question of how you share this information, and how you trust what gets shared. Spammers could pollute a database with valid URLs, thus making people less likely to use it. And even the best intentioned users screw up--that's one reason why people don't universally use IP blacklists--too many false positives.

I think the technique is a great addition to a BCP for filtering. But I can't see a way that it can be used universally. (Is anyone doing a BCP for filtering?)
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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