New Techniques for Countering Spam
Brian Krebs at the Washington Post reports on a new anti-spam technique in New Technology Aims to Bore Impatient Spammers - washingtonpost.com. The new approach works by changing the economics of spam.
MailChannels of Vancouver, Canada, found that by forcing e-mail programs to wait a few seconds before being allowed to communicate with Internet servers handling the recipients' incoming mail, most spammers give up and move on.
There are a few of things to note about this approach. First, it delays all mail, not just spam. This is generally not a problem, most legitimate mail servers will wait and retry to send messages.
Second, there is a potential bottleneck with this delaying approach. MailChannel's software adjusts for this:
E-mail servers operate by addressing sequentially each message's meet-and-greet. ... MailChannels' software looks for those handshake gaps. It then reassigns each message in the queue to a different incoming connection until the original connection is completed.
Finally, this technique will be effective only if it is not widely adopted, at least some fear. This may be the case but we should not be looking for a uniform counter-measure that works in all cases. We'd be better off with a wide variety of techniques that we adapt and evolve over time. There has never been a silver bullet in any area of security and I see no reason to expect one here. Diversity of techniques is a good thing and MailChannel's technique looks like one we'll want to keep around for a long time.
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