Spam Snapshot

My spam filter is reasonably well-trained against SoBig now, such that only a dozen or two forged-To bounces a day get through; the price being that I am unlikely in future to notice when my own emails bounce. Also, the endless inventiveness of the spam merchants is alarming, and they manage to get a few past Mozilla’s Bayesian defenses. Two items of note in this space in recent days: First, the ever-inventive Paul Graham suggests that filters automatically dereference every URI in each incoming message; this is really clever because it means that anyone who sends spam is going to incur a real tangible expense, since nobody gets bandwidth for free. Second, Bill Weinman proposes AMTP, for Authenticated Mail Transfer Protocol; a quick reading of the draft reveals no obvious fatal flaws but I’m no expert in this space. Knowing who sent every email would very likely make the problem go away, though.