Tom’s Garage

My feeling is that services such as Postini are going away in the future. The company may still be around if they roll with the changes but analyzing mail for spam based on content is going away. I think mail will be usable again with permission based mail, using something that is not too difficult to use by Mom and Pop.

MS’ idea of requiring some computing power is decent but being that so many (mostly MS based) computers are in “drone mode” right now, the spammers could care less; They’ll simply use the hacked boxes to deliver their messges of evil. RBLs are cool too but again, the hacked boxes or quick accounts don’t stop the garbage flowing. Bayesian filtering has been a nice way to begin filtering but it is also getting thwarted more and more. I think identity is going to rule the full stoppage of spam but the problem is, it ain’t gonna be easy. You need to get the major players involved and Mom/Dad need to be able to work the system.

I’m not saying that I’ll come up with the solution but I think that content based processes will always be a small step behind the bad guys. We’re filtering based on content and we’ll also likely be behind the bad guys in the near future as well. Bummer. I have some ideas but I want to wait until they take better shape before I share them.

Tags: Spamtastic

This entry was posted by tom on Sunday, December 28th, 2003 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.