Spam: April 2005 Archives
I've been enjoying reading about the bankruptcy hearing involving Scott Richter and Optinrealbig. Microsoft has a large judgment against Scott for spamming. Spamroll has details.
SPAM blocklists are kind of obsolete. They are prone to false positive, and they dont have a very advanced view of a message. Its just a list saying, "I dont want to talk to this IP address". A good blacklist can remove the bulk of the unwanted email and leave the rest of the mail to be scanned by heuristics/Bayesian logic.
The problem comes in when considering who manages the blacklist. For a list to remain trusted, the manager of the list needs to avoid doing stupid things. The RBL is used by RoadRunner, USA.net, BT, Telstra, AOL and Message Labs and many others. So mistakes on this list have huge ramifications. The manager of RBL broke the trust of its users this week when it added AOL to the blocklist. (after complaints, AOL was removed from the list this afternoon)
Reports are that this was one spamming incident and this action was taken by RBL when AOL did not respond within 24 hours. Does that sound like reasonable action when dealing with the email of 30 million people?
RBL has been a rather effective spamfilter (in conjunction with other tests), but now we all have to reconsider whether we can in good confidence continue to use it.
Frequent readers will know that I'm a big fan of Message Labs. They are a company that provides an outsourced email filtering solution. This week Veritest made public their first quarter anti-spam tests and announced that Message Labs had come out on top. http://www.net-security.org/press.php?id=3092
In addition to that, Message Labs has announced a new Anti-Spam Service level agreement. Message Labs has been one of the few companies to offer an antivirus SLA, standing behind their antivirus service. Now they stand behind their antispam service. The new agreement guarantees businesses a spam capture rate of at least 95 percent and the assurance of a false positive commitment of 0.0004 percent. How many other antispam vendors make a similar promise?
In the veritest bakeoff Message Labs had a capture rate of 99.29 percent and a false positive rate of 0.00.
