>Any thoughts on this?
It's a great way to market the concept of 'spamtraps':
>Brightmail, an anti-spam company, sets up dummy mailboxes for ISPs whose
>customers it protects.
Unfortunately, they don't say how Brightmail 'seeds' the addresses, whether
they use legitimate means (such as placing them on web sites, or waiting
for dictionary attacks) or illegitimate means (such as posting dummy
messages in Usenet, which hurts the Internet).
>Since these mailboxes never send mail, any e-mail
>they receive is unsolicited. The e-mail received by the dummy mailboxes
>is cross-referenced, messages are broken into components, a "spam DNA"
>profile is developed, and the reports are compiled into a file
>"fingerprint" which is distributed to Brightmail clients updated every
>five or ten minutes.
Which makes for a great marketing piece, but is totally a marketing
gimmick. The point of developing a "spam profile" is to help the one
organization receiving the spam (IE does it receive mostly porno spam?
Mostly spam from amateur spammers?), that could actually hurt the other
Brightmail users.
On the other hand, a fingerprint would be used to identify spammers (for
example, determining that if a "Date:" header is in all CAPS, and used in
conjunction with a time zone of -1400, it's almost certainly spam from one
specific spammer) .
So the spam profile and fingerprinting are two very different tools that
are being merged into one solely for the purpose of marketing. It's like
saying that the police are telling banks all over the country to be on the
lookout for two guys wearing red-and-blue striped hats that held up the
same bank twice. If those two bank robbers hit the same bank twice, it
isn't likely that they will be robbing a bank halfway across the country.
I'm sure the Brightmail programmers know more about this than the marketers
do. :)
-Scott
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