Re: [Asrg] An Anti-Spam Heuristic

[Martijn Grooten <[e-mail]>]

> But, in a sentence, creating an economy around spam-fighting, an economic
> incentive to fight fraud, would help because money focuses the mind.

I think it's good to keep in mind that we (the anti-spam industry/community) are actually doing rather well at blocking spam. Catch rates are extremely high, false positive rates quite low. There's definitely still room for improvement, particularly among the edges, but if you want to argue for a new way to fight spam, especially one that radically changes the way email works, you will have to explain why it will work even better.

What we're particularly good at, is fighting botnet spam. Global spam levels have decreased in the past four years, largely due to a significant decrease in spam sent via botnets. What is still being sent is relatively easy to block.

Botnet resources, vast as they may be, are ultimately limited and botnets come with a price tag too (literally, on the underground market). And the profit margins on spam, especially botnet spam, are already extremely small. So it may well be that someone will come up with a very clever way of increasing the cost of sending spam via botnets that will make it financially uninteresting for botherders to do so. I seriously wonder how much this would improve things. Of all the things bad guys can do with botnets, sending spam does relatively little harm, and because it involves doing something that home PCs generally aren't supposed to do (namely making outbound connections on TCP port 25), it helps ISPs detect infected customers.

Martijn.


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