Re: [Asrg] An Anti-Spam Heuristic

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

Barry Shein wrote:
> On December 13, 2012 at 09:21 [e-mail] (Michael Thomas) wrote:
>  > On 12/13/2012 09:16 AM, Barry Shein wrote:
>  > > There's also Jef Poskanzer's greymilter which basically requires one
>  > > re-send from each never before seen mail server not in a white list.
>  > >
>  > > And sendmail (and others') HELO delay (delay sending HELO a short
>  > > period of time) and don't speak until you're spoken to whatever they
>  > > call it (I use it, the sender must wait for the SMTP responses, can't
>  > > just dump an SMTP conversation at you.)
>  > >
>  > > They're basically isomorphic to hashcash type solutions, increase the
>  > > sender's cost, but very transparent and quite clever because of that.
>  > >
>  > Given botnets, anything that tries to shift burden back onto the
>  > sender is not very likely to be effective in the long run. Yes, you
>  > might get some short term relief, but the firehose is just a software
>  > update away.
> 
> Has this been measured (reference)? Or is this just one of those
> "truisms" that kick around here?
> 
> I'm thinking that a spammer has to put out on the order of a billion
> messages (attempts) per day to be interesting.
> 
> If you slowed those down that would be a blow to them, a billion times
> even a little is a lot.
> 
> Sure, we can postulate infinite botted systems I suppose.
> 
> But that's still just a wild guess.
> 
> I'm not arguing for hashcash per se, I think it has other problems,
> but I also wonder if this counter-claim is really true.
> 
> Or, put better, can we quantify it?

If tarpitting and other such things were the FUSSP, then everybody would use them,
and the unicorns would come out of hiding. If spammers haven't adjusted their botnet
software, then it really says that there's no evolutionary pressure for them to do so.
If there is, they will do so. What else would they do? Go out of business? They aren't stupid.

Mike