Thursday, October 23, 2003

Spam Throttle. I've written on this before, but it's worth repeating: My feeling is that the internet as a whole is going to evolve towards a trusted/untrusted scenario.  Big vendors like AOL and MSN will be "in the club", so to speak -- their mail systems will "trust" each other, and accept email at full speed. Other systems, particularly those connecting for the first time, will be untrusted.  Those systems will be severly limited in the number of emails that will be accepted.  A Bayesian filter can be applied to the email coming in from any new connection.  The filter doesn't stop the email; rather, it builds an approximation of how much spam is coming in over that particular connection.  The odd false positive isn't going to hurt, that way. As the system gains trust, which can happen only by having time elapse and by having a low spam percentage, trust will gradually accrue, and email traffic will be permitted to have progressively higher volumes. The beauty of this situation is that you still accept email from just about anywhere, but you don't _trust_ that source, until that source proves itself. It doesn't take very much to implement a solution like this.  Any organization that failed to implement it or have a strong anti-spam policy would find itself being on a lot of untrusted lists, and unable to send very much email.  Simply being a transfer point for spam will also get you untrusted, which means that you'll have to pay attention. 5:38:59 PM