Heard about this via /. and followed my nose to the Univ. of Queensland site for the official press release.
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.phtml?article=5833 Revolutionary spam firewall Monday , 23 August 2004 The email spam nightmare could be halted in cyberspace by a groundbreaking firewall developed at The University of Queensland. The new technology is the only true spam firewall in existence, according to co-developer Matthew Sullivan. "Existing anti-spam software filters out spam whereas ours puts up a firewall, stopping all email traffic and only allowing real mail through," said Mr Sullivan. "In addition, our technology is accurate and fast. We recently completed a successful trial of a key layer of the spam firewall and it processed the emails at 90 messages per second, misclassifying only one out of 25,000 emails." "It turned out that the software was even better than us, picking up spam we'd incorrectly classified as legitimate emails." A Specialist Systems Programmer at The University of Queensland, Mr Sullivan worked on the spam firewall concept largely in his spare time, only coming together this year to work on the project with Guy Di Mattina, a recent UQ Engineering honours graduate, and Dr Kevin Gates, a UQ mathematics lecturer. Pivotal to the trio's spam firewall is the unique method of using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to categorise emails. The only anti-spam software that analyses emails as a whole picture, rather than based solely on components such as key words or phrases, said Mr Sullivan.
