Sun, 10 Aug 1997 02:43:02 +0200
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On Sat, 9 Aug 1997 12:16:16 -0400 Russ <[log in to unmask]> said:
>IEMMC announced publicly their intention to permit SPAM,
along with 200 other spam joints. The market rate is $100/month for an
account that will not be closed no matter what you send.
>I thought LSoft would have proactively sent a spam filter to all
>Listserv lists (and please correct me if I'm wrong, I thought my list
>was receiving information from LSoft on a regular basis, i.e. daily) to
>stop messages with IEMMC's stated header item.
Spam alerts have a well defined format and syntax, and specific
capabilities. One capability they do not have is to process alerts of the
form "New spam joint XYZ has announced that it will be sending spam from
randomly generated domains with the following kind of pattern in the
message header". Thus L-Soft does not have the capability to do this
without a code change. As a matter of fact, the spam joints are going out
of their way to prevent filters from identifying their spam as spam.
IEMMC is a first and I am a bit skeptical about it having any long-term
value.
>Given that Agis, a not so small backbone ISP, delegated SPAM
>responsibility to IEMMC, it would seem that IEMMC is (at least in Agis'
>eyes) going to uphold their stated conditions and mechanisms. The result
>is that Agis will likely sell a lot more bandwidth as SPAM organizations
>move over to them to avoid ISP hassles associated with SPAM. That then
>extends to a lot more SPAM being produced, and this stuff should all
>contain the IEMMC header item (or so the theory goes).
I have heard a rumour that there is a lawsuit or settlement (can't
remember which) in progress between Agis and its first-tier provider and
that this will soon become a non-issue :-)
Anyway, the spam detector is not designed to do pattern filtering.
Pattern filtering is explicitly something we did not want to have, both
because it is easy to program around for the spammers and because it
raises legal issues along the lines of the Prodigy lawsuit. The spam
detector rejects messages that have been massively cross-posted. By
definition these messages are out of topic in the vast majority of the
target lists. No judgment is made on the contents of the messages, merely
on their distribution method. The spam filter works equally well for your
average "Make Money Fast" plan and for racist propaganda or "God loves
you" broadcasts. Filter based detectors typically let racist propaganda
through because they were not programmed to detect it. If
"X-Advertisement" becomes a standard, it will be another thing, but right
now it is just the latest finding of an ISP that is desperate to get out
of the hole it has dug for itself.
Eric
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