Re: An Anti-Spam Heuristic

On December 13, 2012 at 09:21 [email protected] (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?


-- 
        -Barry Shein

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