Subject: RE: [Asrg] define spam

From: "Eric D. Williams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 18:23:29 -0500

On Thursday, April 03, 2003 4:49 PM, Brad Spencer 
[SMTP:[email-masked]] wrote:
> These discussions (which mostly I've seen in NANAE) drive me nuts.  I get
> spam in my account, I know its spam.  More to the point I trap relay spam
> to thousands of people using a honeypot.  I don't need any definition to
> check on that: it's spam.  I'd be certifiably nuts if I fretted over what I
> trapped being spam or not.

But we need a definition to perform effective research into ways to mitigate 
'it'.  That is the reason for defining what 'it' is for the sake of all of this 
groups efforts being focused on the same 'thing'.

-e

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From: Brad Spencer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 17:51:02 -0600

>groups efforts being focused on the same 'thing'.

Understood, but the effort ends up in the marginal areas while huge waves 
of what almost all would agree to be spam keep crashing through. I think 
it's safe to say, as a first approximation, that anything Ralsky sends is 
spam.  Make that anything anyone sends through an unrelated 3rd party relay 
and it is still extremely likely to be true.  Most people would have no 
ideas if my honeypot relayed or looked like  it relayed and they wouldn't 
try to use it.  Spammers are the only ones looking for relays so they can 
(ab)use them.  If your fake relay has no real email function then all it 
captures is spam.  I can understand the need for others (who use other 
methods) to have a definition but even there isn't there a chance that the 
definition exercise can get too precise and time-consuming?  There's got to 
be a simple definition that, by volume, successfully identifies 99.9% of 
actual spam as spam.  All the discussion is over that last 0.1%  I'm not 
sure it's worth it - stop the 99.9% first and see if the 0.1% disappears 
all by itself.

If it's 98% and 2% I still feel the same way.