[IP] more on Why it is difficult to counter spam
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 22, 2004 4:46:44 PM EDT
To: <gep2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <dfarber@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] : Why it is difficult to counter spam
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:51:05 +0000 (GMT), gep2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 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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