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Re: [Asrg] Please critique my anti-spam system

2005-01-06 07:08:25
At 8:28 PM -0500 1/5/05, Michael Kaplan wrote:

There is still some concern that the bounces will "spam" innocent people. If we arbitrarily guess that 1 out of 50 forged spam return addresses represents a real active account, and if we assume that bounces will only be sent back to 5% of spams after filtering, then we would have a 'bounce spam'
problem that is only 1/1000th the size of the spam that is being sent out.

 This is not even
taking into account the ease with which a bounce can be prevented from reaching a user if that user had not sent out the corresponding email. I do not believe that this will be the flaw that sinks this system.

Bouncing 0.1% of all spam to random uninvolved people *by design* is not an acceptable approach.

This is a big part of why I think it would be good to have this class of system tried as an alternative to the existing email system instead of as a variant intermixed with it. The response of many non-ISP mail systems to a bunch of misdirected challenges would be to simply stop taking mail at all from the sites emitting the challenges. Maybe 80% of users and all of the big consumer ISP's will be eager for that sort of approach, but it is fundamentally incompatible with (and I expect would be shunned by) a sizable fraction of existing mail systems and users.


--
Bill Cole
bill(_at_)scconsult(_dot_)com


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