[PLUG] Saving bandwidth...

Jeff Schwaber freyley at gmx.net
Wed Sep 3 16:58:06 UTC 2003


On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 16:14, Michael C. Robinson wrote:
> If you scan email for spam at an ISP of other ISP's you save bandwidth
> from that ISP to the target(s).  I'm figuring the messages have to clear
> text for an ISP to scan them, hence the privacy questions.  The only
> obvoius magic bullet I can think of is to throw anything out that has
> any forged address in it.  The sooner an email is discarded on route
> to a destination, the more bandwidth there is, hence where scanning it
> can be part of saving bandwidth even though that means it has been
> transmitted somewhere.  
> 
>     --  Michael

problems:

1) how do you define a forged header? I have email accounts that do not
have SMTP servers, and I send email from those addresses using other
SMTP servers...is that a forged header? A computer is likely going to
think so.

2) if you discard the email, you are violating the rule of
non-interference which is critical because false positives mean that
email becomes an untrustworthy medium (not untrustworthy in that it's
insecure, cause we know it is, but untrustworthy in that you cannot
trust an email will be delivered. Right now you mostly can.) Or do you
send back a response to the originator? Cause that cancels out the
bandwidth savings.

Yet if you log and block the email and let the administrator look at it,
you create metric tons more work for the administrator.

The only thing I can see working for this idea relies on large hard
drive space and ignores privacy: store copies of email for 3 hours as
they go through. If you see more than 5 duplicates of an email, start
dropping it, because it's clearly spam. But then, the spammers will just
write code which puts some random text into their spam.

So I'm not sure you can win with this one. At least not with the way
you're thinking.

Jeff





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