Solution

Solution

Posted May 7, 2004 21:02 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
In reply to: Solution by yodermk
Parent article: 82% of email is spam

OK, so I've spent a few minutes thinking about problems with IM2000 in terms of spam avoidance, and trying to think up a solution.

The problem I see is that this doesn't address spam at all. It just changes the delivery mechanism. Today, the spammers bombard your MTA (e.g., Sendmail, Postfix, or Exchange) with spam. Your MTA uses a lot of resources (CPU, memory, disk) dealing with this. Depending on the MTA and configuration, it may or may not be able to do some filtering to avoid actually storing some of the spam in your mail queue. Then you check your inbox using an MUA (mail client such as Evolution, Mozilla Mail, Eudora, or Outlook). The MUA may also do some filtering, but at the very least has to inspect the headers of each message the MTA has received for you.

With IM2000, the spammer's machine doesn't directly send the spam to you. Instead, it tells your MTA (or whatever the IM2000 equivalent of an MTA is) that there is mail waiting for you on the spammer's machine. So now instead of getting 1200 spam emails a day, you get 1200 email waiting notifications from random machines all over the internet, many of which are probably zombies. Ultimately your software doesn't have any better way to tell which are spam than in today's architecture; it will simply have to poll each of the 1200 sender mail servers to get the mail headers and try to filter them.

This has *perhaps* reduced the internet backbone bandwidth consumed somewhat, if the filtering can be done with inspection of headers only and not the full message body, but it has not solved the spam problem. In fact, given that the IM2000 model provides for the sender's mail server to repeat the "mail available" notifications to the receiver, it may not even affect the bandwidth consumption. And it certainly does not improve the bandwidth consumption on the user's local link.

As far as I can see, IM2000 is a solution to a non-problem. It has attempted to solve the problem of reducing the amount of disk space the recipient needs to store the email, but disk space is the least significant problem associated with spam.

IM2000 appears to solve the "mailing list problem", except that there isn't really a "mailing list problem" either.

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