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Re: AOL Spam down 27%

2004-03-25 17:13:02
On Thursday 25 March 2004 22:27, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 13:32 -0800, Greg Connor wrote:
You'll note that even aol.com and pobox.com have records which end in
'?all', which is largely equivalent to not publishing a record at all.

Not completely true... If the mail can be "confirmed as authorized" then 
there are some benefits there... I think spamassassin gives a slight boost 
to the score, for example.

Consider the phrase 'slight boost' and the result of 
strcmp("largely equivalent","completely identical");

The result appears to be a positive lexical quantum (er, 1).

The boost need not be that slight, but should reflect the likelyhood of the 
domain being a spam source. That in turn depends on the practices of the 
registrar, such as the ability to identify the owner and the price of new 
domains.

It may make sense for reputation systems to initialise each newly encountered 
domain's 'karma' based on a parent-domain-specific value, and use that to 
calculate the level of boost to give. If widely applied, registrars will gain 
an incentive to stop throwaway spam domain registrations.

- Dan


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