more on Why it is difficult to counter spam

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker () brandenburg com>
Date: September 22, 2004 4:46:44 PM EDT
To: <gep2 () terabites com>, <dfarber () cs cmu edu>
Subject: Re: [IP] : Why it is difficult to counter spam

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:51:05 +0000 (GMT), gep2 () terabites com wrote:
> > From a technical standpoint, spam looks pretty much like legitimate 
> > mail.
>
>  Actually, no.  (Well, okay, SOME does.)
>
>  A lot of spam is fairly easily identified by using a variety of 
> heuristics.

I chose to stay out of the muck of the spam 'arms race'.

In fact, the folks who develop heuristic filters love the content that
spammers use to try to defeat simplistic filters, because it does make 
their
spam distinctive.

However my original point is that there are no inherent differences.


I think you might need to re-read the rest of the paragraph I wrote on 
this,
because it anticipated your comments about apparent differences.

>  An awful lot of spam can be filtered out by a few very simple rules.

First, this goes back to the arms race problem. Spammers have gotten 
quote
sophisticated and tend to be able to defeat whatever the current level 
of
filtering sophistication is.

Second, spammers play a statistics game and send many multiples of 
copies to
you, through different paths, hoping that some percentage will get 
through.
This turns out to work quite well.  Reduce the statistics and they will 
simply
send more.  Or, at least, that is what they have been doing.


>  HTML-burdened E-mail is of course the root cause of many E-mail 
> dangers and
>  deceptions.

Now you are getting silly.  Yes, HTML has holes, but the core of 
spamming is
deception and it does not matter whether the formatting is in straight 
ascii
or in html.  Con men are good at social engineering.

Very, very good.


date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.

d/
--
Dave Crocker  <mailto:dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://brandenburg.com>




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