Re: asrg - research or die

At first I had a predictably disappointed reaction to John's ultimatum
but on reflection I tend to agree with him.

In particular the meta-discussion about list mechanics gets old, fast.

But even focusing on "what would be research? what would be progress
(on the problem at hand)?"  would be more productive than "what is
spam?"

For example, modeling tools for email and other messaging behavior
might be useful.

I informally rely on very ad hoc tools here such as just picking out
the top email "user unknown" IPs in a real-time display I put
together. At certain thresholds some get blocked for a period of time.

Some might be amazed how often we get "dictionary attacks" and similar
from $BIGSITE that can go on for days. Right this minute there's one
going on from hotmail.com, mail to gdean1, gdean2, gdean3, ..., gdi1,
gdi2, ... on and on.

But in a sense that's a modeling tool, or an instrumentation anyhow.

Granted it's also an perhaps an example of how differently this
problem looks from the POV of an ISP vs an end-user just trying to
focus their email inbox better.


-- 
        -Barry Shein

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