Re: Research-y

> 2. 1000+ new TLDs

YMMV, but I think most filters that look for domains in header and/or body can deal with this, as long as the number of TLDs remains relatively small and the list of TLDs doesn't change too often.

There are some edge cases, such as badly punctuated sentences suddenly containing valid domains, or TLDs used internally that are visible in some lower Received headers suddenly becoming global, but I don't think these are worth losing sleep over.

> 3. IDN (Int'l'ized domain names, Chinese, Arabic, etc)

Depending on how you detect domains/URLs in emails, this can be slightly more tricky to deal with, especially given the various character encodings, but at the end of the day, it's not rocket science either.

The other day, someone mentioned homographs used in IDNs, to create look-alike domains, but despite this being available for years, spammers aren't using it. They probably never will.

I don't think the new TLDs or IDNs are different enough from the current situation to require some proper research into how to deal with them, any more than a new weight loss product being advertised on Oprah next week will generate different spam.

> 4. Just growth in
> general, any correlation worth reporting
>    or extrapolating?

It might be an interesting project to do some research on how much spam is being sent, and how the number of spam emails has evolved over time. Most reports suggest that this number has declined in the past four years.

> 5. Expansion of mobile etc (smartphones, tablets.) Have there
>    been any smartphone botnets (yet)?

Yes. But, although there have been rumours of the contrary, I'm not aware of any mobile botnets that have been used for email spam. I don't know whether sending spam from a compromised mobile device is any more difficult than sending spam from a compromised PC (my gut feeling is that it isn't), but there are other, easier, ways to make money from a compromised phone.

Martijn.


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