November 1st, 2007
Broader collaboration needed against spam
An effective war against spam requires that open source collaborate with the proprietary world.
That’s the view Vipul Ved Prakash Prakesh (right), creator of Vipul’s Razor, and Justin Mason of the Apache Foundation, project committee member for Spam Assassin.
I talked to both men about both this and Prakash’s day job as founder and chief scientist for Cloudmark.
Cloudmark’s niche in the anti-spam market lies with small corporations and ISPs, said product director Dave Champine. “We came up with a plug-in API, and I’m happy to see Cloudmark’s commercial product running on top of the Spam Assassin platform.”
Still, the spam wars are an arms race. Increasingly consumers are turning to Web-based systems like GMail and dumping their Outlook Express addresses, mainly due to false positives which keep vital mail from getting through.
“You have a perfect storm brewing,” said Mason, spam volumes growing 100% per year. Even if more bits are running through peer-to-peer protocols, the sheer number of messages makes spam the biggest challenge faced by Internet routers.
“The processing power to identify these new sophisticated approaches, and fundamentally the storage….that impact is intense,” said Mason. The solution, added Prakash, is to “create a closed loop between the user and the filter,” making each filter unique to reduce false positives.
“Infrastructures have upgraded quite a bit in the last year and we’ll soon start to see an impact from that,” Prakash insisted.
But the question remains, can even this collaboration save small enterprises from the spam flood?
What do you think?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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