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Re: [ietf-smtp] Dombox - A Zero Spam Mail System

2019-09-26 13:41:30
On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 6:39 AM Dave Crocker <dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> 
wrote:

On 9/25/2019 11:57 PM, David MacQuigg wrote:
The big problem I see with new solutions to the spam problem is - there
is no longer a problem.  Most of the big email services are doing such a
good job of filtering the spam that there is really no incentive to
deploy a whole new system.

This is a false sense of security.

90-95% of the email traffic across the open Internet is spam.  Worse,
the bad actors are intelligent, aggressive and adaptable.  The current
situation is a constant arms race.  That defines a fundamentally
unstable situation, no matter how well the defenders are doing at any
given moment.


The volume of spam is not a problem for a properly implemented Receiver,
like I had at box67.com http://open-mail.org/BorderPatrol.html   As for the
super-human intelligence of spammers, I have not seen any scheme that can
defeat a well-implemented whitelist.


So, yeah, end users typically see only a tiny fraction of spam, but a)
that requires massive amounts of continuing effort by those running
filtering agents, and b) enough still gets through to cause real-world
problems for end users.


I was surprised by how little effort it took to whitelist a few dozen of
the biggest senders, which accounted for maybe 95% of our legitimate
incoming mail.  That's a 20X improvement over sending it all through a
statistical filter.  Yes, there is still some doubt whether we could have
"scaled up" to a system the size of any of the big services, but the
possibility of scaling up was always in the design.  Before I lost
interest, and moved on to other projects, we had plans to use our Receiver
at the University of Arizona with some 74,000 recipients.  This would have
required 2 or 3 students working part-time to maintain our whitelist.  I am
confident it would have worked.  We just couldn't get any funding.  Also, U
of A decided to let Google handle all their mail.

As for the continuing problems of real-world users, I suggest that they
switch to a service like gmail or yahoo.
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