On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 11:07:28AM -0500, Jonathan A. Zdziarski wrote:
Being damaging to anonymity would not be a fatal objection to a proposal.
That a proposal ignores the issue would (IMO) be.
This eliminates all statistical-based filters (Bayesian, Chi-Square,
etc.), which are among the most successful spam tools that exist today,
as the sender's true identity is of no importance to the filter.
That is because they require no infrastructure. Additionally, you need
to define 'success'. Configuring your MTA to only accept connections
from hosts which are an MX for the domain they HELO as, will also block
lots of spam - it may however have a higher false positive rate.
These
filters are based on the philosophy that all email will continue to be
anonymous
I disagree. I would say that these filters are based on the issue that
there is no current alternative to anonymous mail, so they address the
only aspect that they can - content.
I don't think it's reasonable to read anything into the philosophy of
filter authors about their expectations for the future - they're just
trying to solve a problem with the available inputs.
and therefore pays attention to the one tell-tale
characteristic of all spams: their content. So I would recommend if
you're going to require that a proposal address the issue of anonymity,
you give the author the ability to suggest that it is ignored by the
filter.
Filters certainly don't affect anonymity, but until a program passes the
Turing Test, I won't be convinced that filters can't be fooled.
Even then, textual analysis requires far more cpu overhead than an
access list check. If the spammers have any hope that their message will
get through to you, they have incentive to send more and more spam. If
the spammers have NO hope that their message will get through to you,
they do not have incentive any more.
--
David Maxwell, david(_at_)vex(_dot_)net|david(_at_)maxwell(_dot_)net -->
Net Musing #5: Redundancy in a network doesn't mean two of everything and
half the staff to run it.
- Tomas T. Peiser, CET
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