Comment Feed for Hotmail Fighting Junk Mail : Hello MSN Postmaster (Coffeehouse on Channel 9)

Re: Hotmail Fighting Junk Mail : Hello MSN Postmaster

El Bruno — Fri, 27 May 2005 08:47:39 GMT

Personally I develop and use FlowRuler (www.flowruler.com). After a year of Spam, I've a big Spam DB that filters the 60% of the Spam Mail ..

Bye from Spain
El Bruno
http://spaces.msn.com/members/brunocapuano

Re: Hotmail Fighting Junk Mail : Hello MSN Postmaster

Maurits — Thu, 26 May 2005 17:21:46 GMT

Good to see Hotmail has an SPF record. What's up with Sender ID? Haven't seen any progress on that front for a while.

EDIT: Just found this interesting article on mail filtering
"In November 2004, Microsoft's second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some headlines by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day. At the time, I was dealing with a little spam problem of my own - I was getting around a million spams per day. I found it a little comforting that my problem wasn't quite as bad as Bill's. However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer corrected himself, saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million per year.

This means I was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates...
"

It goes on to say how he dealt with it.

Heh - as I entered this post I got a "new email" alert from my Hotmail gizmo. It said I had a new email from Paypal.

Sure enough, it's a phish asking me to re-enter my Paypal authentication info to "protect my account". The hook? I don't have a Paypal account, never have.

EDIT: Warning, the author gets a little carried away on the "Conclusions" page and he says some less-than-politically-correct things about Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Re: Hotmail Fighting Junk Mail : Hello MSN Postmaster

figuerres — Thu, 26 May 2005 17:17:37 GMT

Maurits wrote:
Good to see Hotmail has an SPF record. What's up with Sender ID? Haven't seen any progress on that front for a while.

IMHO the whole email system needs a good "overhaul"

a while back I was on the IETF anti-spam group mailing list...

I came to the conclusion that it was not going to work.

why?

they kept focusing on the wrong things too often.

for example: it took ages for folks to start to agree that classifing a message as spam at the mailserver level is almost futile and useless.

why do I say that?

well for example freedom of speech issues, bad classifcation and the like and so on....

and a better angle IMHO is to look at network abuse as the basis.

inother words don't chase down some moron/scam/con based on you view of the "content" of the messages.
in place of that go after them for the way they are taking over your network and abusing your system by flooding it with traffic that 90% (or some large number) of your users do not want.

and also go after them for "Forgery" of the mail.

and modify SMTP to help with that...

today it is very easy to fake the emails headers to look like they come from
if the scam artist can't forge the from: to: re-to: and other headers then we don't have to guess at who sent the junk, the sending server can be traced and the sender and/or the senders ISP can be held accoutable for the junk.

then the junk can stop beeing profitable for them.

lot's more can be said.... like chnaging the rules in email clients about html and other mime attachments.
just to name one other big thing.