AccuTechnology software patent

[Marc Perkel]

I've read your web page and I'm a little confused about what it is you 
hope to patent.

The concept of sebder verification is not new. In fact it's already in 
Exim and Postfix now and I'm using it and it works great. Unlink what 
you are proposing - sending "confirmation" messages to see if they 
bounce - Exim starts a bounce message sequence and sees if it takes it. 
And you can distinguish between misconfigured servers and servers that 
really say that there is no user by that name. I have a number of Exim 
tricks that allow me to get rid of 90% of spam without SA ever seeing 
it. I use SA for the hard ones.

In my setup I bounce incoming mail that is clearly not from a real user 
at connect time. I don't bother to accept the message and learn it 
because these messages are from really poor spammers and I don't want to 
waste the cpu resources to process it. By rejecting these email it makes 
my spam corpus better in that my spam comes from smarter spammers and is 
more of a challenge to detect. Processing message from dumb spammers 
gives you a false sense of success and I think artificially inflates the 
success rates.

As to your superior filter - are you talking about some new bayesian 
like filter you've developed? I am currebtly running 2 bayesian filters 
on my system. The second filter - spamprobe - is fed custom tokens that 
are generated by a program I wrote that passes only the (enhanced) 
headers and hot parts of the body. The output of spamprobe is turned 
into 11 levels of results and fed back into SA for scoring. Are you 
doing something like this? If so - I'm already doing it.

I'm against software patents in the first place - but I question from 
what you have on your web site if you have anything that really is 
patentable. If so - it doesn't seem to describe it. So - I'm left confused.