Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
RE: regarding spam...
From: Rama Kant <kant () adeptech com>
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 16:46:28 -0500
These days a significant volume of SPAM is coming from some of those mass email distribution companies. A large number of such companies do not care where the mailing lists come from; in fact they would very likely not even have a reverse name entry for their mail server's IP address. This way they force an extra step in their identification.
Legality issue: Any organization has the right to refuse junk mail. As long as the decision to refuse mail lies with an organization, how can a vendor supplying the service be taken to court, e.g. website filter vendors simply provide a database of offensive sites. (Please note that I am not giving a legal advice here.)
For a while we have been kicking around ideas similar to Andrew Kalat's and implemented as Vipul's Razor www.vipul.net. The added dimension here is of certain implanted addresses.
In general the process may work as follows:A hash is calculated of the content and added to a database. Individual organizations may decide the tolerance limits on hash values based upon their own criteria. Of course the tolerance limits have to be set to keep the false positives to a very low level. Even if a service bureau calculates hashes for unsolicited messages, that bureau is really not making the decision on whether to allow such a message or reject it.
Building of junk mailing lists -- mostly the addresses are harvested from many different sources major among them are websites. A given collection of websites will contain 'special-purpose' addresses to collect SPAM by service bureaus. As soon as a SPAM is received at these addresses its hash is calculated and added to the database.
It is this database that is checked against, either remotely or locally (downloaded/updated frequently), for possible SPAM. Based on an organization's policy the SPAM is appropriately dealt with.
Rama Kant Voice: 703.404.3775 Director of Engineering Direct: 703.477.3583 Adeptech Systems, Inc. Email: kant () adeptech com 1420 Spring Hill Road, Suite 600 http://www.adeptech.com McLean, VA 22102 _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () nfr com http://list.nfr.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- Re: regarding spam..., (continued)
- Re: regarding spam... R. DuFresne (Apr 02)
- Re: regarding spam... Adam Shostack (Apr 03)
- Re: regarding spam... Ryan Russell (Apr 03)
- Re: regarding spam... Adam Shostack (Apr 03)
- Re: regarding spam... Rick Murphy (Apr 02)
- Re: Re: regarding spam... Andrew Fremantle (Apr 03)
- Re: regarding spam... Mikael Olsson (Apr 03)
- Re: regarding spam... Crispin Cowan (Apr 03)
- RE: regarding spam... Rama Kant (Apr 03)