On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 20:21, Bill Cole wrote:the coming year or so is likely to see some serious advances in anti-spam methodology
Huummm, that sounds *really* interesting. Would you care to elaborate on that?
The Internet Research Task Force, which is the body focused on developing new technologies for the net, formed an Anti-Spam Research Group earlier this year and while there are issues similar to getting a committee of cats to work, there are some likely candidates for formal adoption and forward movement. One class of proposals that I have been a fan of for a few years is some way to put more validation info into DNS so that when a machine in Korea says 'HELO compuserve.com' or claims to be sending MAIL FROM:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> there is some way to query the owners of those domain names whether machines in Korea might ever legitimately use them. the semantics are not yet settled and there are competing proposals (RMX, DRIP, SPF...) but I expect that there will be SOMETHING issued as an RFC and deployed by some major ISP's by his time next year. Some may even be deploying much sooner. The ASRG is also bringing forth the details of a number of methods already in use in small ways which may gain wider application. Beyond just the work coming out of the ASRG, the sheer volume of spam is generating a lot of desperate flailing by many parties, including mistakes like the deeply stupid Verizon callback scheme. Many of the approaches being used will go nowhere, but some may well become common. Even the callback model, if implemented intelligently, could catch on.
These are things you cannot glue to SIMS externally. You can be absolutely certain that any open methodology which comes out of the ASRG and/or catches on with more than one or two significant ISP's will have Sendmail and Postfix implementations. I expect that by this time next year, SIMS will for the first time be significantly behind the leading edge in SMTP-layer anti-spam tricks. The lack of a useful way to hook in body filters is already leading people off to alternatives, mainly Postfix on OSX, just as the free EIMS lost its users to SIMS over moribund development and missing features 6 years ago.
A couple years ago I was still recommending SIMS in some places because it fit well and nothing else did, but that is a rapidly shrinking set of situations. The learning curve and user friendliness for Postfix on OSX hasn't made it anywhere near SIMS yet, but it will get better and the tradeoffs are already significant for any site that needs to scale beyond a friends and family level. The fact that Panther-capable (and Linux-PPC or Darwin-capable) hardware is in some cases castoff hardware means that one of SIMS' historically important features is pretty much moot.
-- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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