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Re: [Asrg] Comments on draft-church-dnsbl-harmful-01.txt

2006-04-01 17:52:20
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Justin Mason wrote:
Chris said:

Okay, suggest how a spam/ham collection can be used to measure the
effectiveness of the following techniques that are, or can be, used in
an anti-spam solution:

1) grey listing
2) sender/sender domain verification
3) Challenge/response
4) SPF and DKIM
5) PKI
6) CSV
7) Non-existant users
8) DCC or other distributed checksumming methodologies.

Similarly DNSBLs.


The effectiveness of all of these, except possibly for greylisting and
C/R, can be measured accurately. We are doing it in SpamAssassin ;) --
here's how.

First, you accept every message, and record the "real-time" data
points regarding how the message was listed against those services,
and/or how it *would* have been rejected at SMTP transaction time (if
at all). However, you don't reject, you accept everything.

Then, later, provide a way for hand-sorting to take place, and compare
the results of the hand-sorting with what the various other techniques
would have done with those messages.

Hey presto, you've now got a way to compare accuracy and effectiveness
of those techniques!  Simple as that.

Do you see any provision for that with _any_ of the spam/ham
collections?  Can you do that with a pre-existing spam/ham collection if
the technique you were trying to test _wasn't_ being collected at the
time the spam/ham collection was being made?

This points up my very point: in order to do a proper sampling of the
effectiveness of a technique is that you do it in real time, at the time
the emails were sent.  In other words, on real mail streams.
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