Re: Let's try to be productive...

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>On Jan 5, 2014, at 7:26 PM, Barry Shein <[email protected]> wrote:

>> 1. High volume "bulk" mailers
>> 2. Phishers
>> 3. Direct fraudulent or trust appeals
>> 4. High volume unsolicited email
>> 5. What about email dictionary attacks and similar?
>> 6. purely malicious or hard to discern very high volume email

the problem with this "taxonomy" is that it is mixing up issues related
to the nature of the sender, the nature of the content and the degree to
which the email is targeted

as such I don't see much value to it :(

#4 for example (empty bodies) is generally believed to be malfunctioning
software that would be sending you #1 type email if it wasn't so buggy

In message <[email protected]>, Steve
Atkins <[email protected]> writes

>Other than that, all of the above. I’d add malware emails

which is a content issue ... since it generally comes under #1 or #2

>I have more concern about mail that’s coming from senders
>who send a mix of wanted and unwanted email, as opposed
>to senders of 99%+ unwanted email, as it’s much harder to
>reliably mechanically mitigate. They’re not really a large
>fraction of the problem right now, though (other than exceptions
>like Amazon, Yahoo and Google).

again -- a mixing of issues. The reason you see a mixture of email from
Yahoo, Gmail (etc) is that they provide service to hundreds of millions
of people (each) and some of those people are more wicked than others

However, if you see a mixture of email from Amazon, then their machine
learning marketing system is malfunctioning

BTW: no-one has mentioned the distinction so far (which matters
considerably for senders like Gmail, Yahoo etc) between senders who
exist solely to send spam ("mass reg" in the usual jargon) and those who
are compromised (they re-used their password at a third party who was
then popped).

- -- 
Dr Richard Clayton                         <[email protected]>
                                  tel: 01223 763570, mobile: 07887 794090
                    Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, CB3 0FD

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