On Apr 13, 2008, at 5:04 PM, Barry Shein wrote:
Massive quoting gets old fast so I'll try to summarize and if I misrepresent your POV in any way my profuse apologies in advance.
First and foremost let me say that if we had a vote here tomorrow on the spam problem I suspect you'd win but that's because most people, even (especially) people who believe themselves to be technically knowledgeable, hold a lot of misconceptions about spam. So much for democracy.
I say the core problem in spam are the botnets capable of delivering on the order of 100 billion msgs/day.
You say there are other kinds of spammers.
I'll agree but if we got rid of or incapacitated the massive botnets that would be a trickle, manageable, and hardly be worth fussing about, particularly on an operational list.
The reason is that without the botnets the spammers don't have address mobility. You could just block their servers.
Address mobility doesn't buy you that much. It's relatively easy to mechanically detect, and block, IP addresses that source mail solely from spam- related botnets. (Not easy in the absolute sense, but easier than other problems and, mostly, a solved one). Botnet sourced mail generally doesn't get seen much by recipients at ISPs with competent spam filtering. It sure can cause other operational problems, but in terms of being a "spam problem" it's not the biggest one out there. Blocking unwanted mail from sources that send a mixture of wanted and unwanted mail, while still allowing the wanted mail through is extremely difficult, and a much, much harder problem for spam mitigation to solve. And those are primarily the non-botnet sources. Spam filtering at real ISPs with real recipients has to deal with the fact that recipients do want to read some of the mail they're sent from Gmail, Yahoo Groups, Topica and suchlike. Cheers, Steve