On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 07:48:01PM -0500, Chris Lewis wrote:
However, given the volumes that even merely medium sized MTAs see, and
at least some possibility of false positives, even if it didn't blow the
ARF-recipients off the air, the volume and potential problems would
render it useless.
It just don't scale.
I'm going to concur here, and in addition suggest that this is yet another
instance of an approach that fails a basic "sniff test" for any email
abuse technology: does it generate more email? If the answer is "yes",
then it's probably a bad idea, because the last thing we need when we're
drowning in junk SMTP traffic is more.
Incidentally, I recently concluded an analysis of nearly 5 years worth of
feedback loop traffic from AOL. (Which is the first one I started using
on a site of appreciable volume.) This analysis, partially automated
and partially manual, arrived at the following interesting conclusion:
the FP rate is 100.000%. Every single feedback loop report identifying
traffic as spam was wrong.
I don't say that to criticize AOL so much as I do the approach - which
is end-user-driven. Let's keep in mind (as Marcus Ranum famously pointed
out) that half of users will click on anything that purports to contain
naked pictures of semi-famous females. I don't think this population is
within a light-year of being qualified to make spam/not-spam decisions.
(And by the way, I have no reason to think that AOL's user population
is any better or worse at this than anyone else's.)
(By the way, has implications for the dubious approach of quarantining,
which also relies on the ability of end users to make spam/not-spam,
phish/not-phish, etc. decisions. There is no reason to think that
they're any better at that.)
---Rsk
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