After reading an interesting site The Spam Problem: Moving Beyond RBLs I am more interested in a plan I have for a better way to fight SPAM.
The best way to describe it would be an Automatic Distributed Notification System.
SPAMers need to send out a lot of email. Some reports indicate that a
system setup to send out SPAM will do so in the order of millions of
emails per day. SPAMers do not just use one system to do this they will
often recruit the use of zombie systems that are someone else's
computer that has been infected with a computer virus that allowed the
SPAMer to take over control of the system. Many people with computers
that have been turned into zombies do not even know that this has
happened.
My plan is to have a free service where a reporting server network
maintains an automatic database of instantaneous threat levels based on
a point system. Every email sent from an IP address increases the
accumulated points and over the passage of time the points go back
down.
Receiving SMTP servers would report the originating IP address of all
email with a calculated value that generally describes the local threat
of the message. When the receiving SMTP server sends this report it
will receive a numerical value to tell it the level of threat that the
message could be SPAM. This number will be between 0 and 1000. Zero
being no chance this is SPAM and 1000 being that this message is SPAM.
Administrators and individual users can use filtering to decided what
to do with the messages after that.
Every message sent from an IP address will slightly increase the point
value of that IP being used for sending SPAM. The receiving SMTP server
would use a common content scanner to decide the threat level of the
message and send that number to the reporting server. Points could be
assigned like so 1 point for just making a connection and add 2 points
if the local content scanner qualifies it as SPAM. If the administrator
of the receiving SMTP server wants they can add additional 2 points if
the email came from a foreign country.
Although the reporting service could be totally free, administrators of
receiving SMTP servers that want to use the service would have to apply
for access to the service and be registered with the reporting network
to prevent a SPAMer from performing a DDoS (Distributed Denial of
Service) attack on the reporting network. With receiving SMTP servers
registered the network that deals with the reporting could be dynamic
in the Internet and the workload could shift from one anonymous server
to another and load balancing would be easy to do.
Large Web Mail companies and ISP's would be exempt from points
collection. In the beginning this information would be monitored to
determine who these exemptions would be.
I welcome your input on this and any ideas you have that would help
make this better. If you are a developer and would like to work on this
project please contact me so that we may collaborate.
Royce.Souther@SiliconTao.com
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