Re: [RETRANSMIT] Re: Radical Surgery proposal: stopdoingreverse for IPv6.

[Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>]

At 3:04 PM -0500 2003/03/24, Dean Anderson wrote:

>  Spam, like most group phenomena, is roughly uniform, unless there is a
>  reason for it to be different, such as a targeted attack on a specific
>  site.

	On sufficiently large samples, this may be true.  However, when 
it comes to the spam that any individual gets, well there aren't any 
smaller sample sizes than that.  Any assumptions may make about the 
larger population may (probably will) be totally invalid when it 
comes to specific individuals.

>         My spam statistics should be roughly the same as your spam
>  statistics given a sufficient sample size,

	Maybe.  Maybe not.  Since you don't have access to all of Jim's 
e-mail over the past decade-plus, you will never know.

>  If you are dropping connections based on no reverse DNS, then you don't
>  know whether the message you dropped was spam or ham.

	Again, maybe, maybe not.  However, you are making inaccurate 
conclusions based on incomplete data.  This is a case where you would 
be better off keeping your mouth shut and merely thought to be a fool.

>  Further, as pointed out at the MIT anti-spam conference (which I
>  attended), people making claims like yours aren't really checking spam vs.
>  ham results, which is necessary to obtain results on effectiveness. Most
>  people simply put in some filters, which deletes some mail, and they have
>  no idea how much of the deleted mail is spam, vs how much is ham.  When
>  you report "not a single false positive" you are just reporting your
>  confidence in your methods, not the true effectiveness of your methods.

	Tell me something.  How many decades have you been doing DNS? 
How many decades have you been doing e-mail?  Of those decades, how 
much of that work has been at the highest volume sites in the world, 
where millions and billions of spams are dealt with on a daily basis?

	Unless you have more experience doing the DNS than anyone in the 
world, and more experience doing e-mail and dealing with spam than 
anyone else in the world, and you can call on this experience in 
making proclamations about the kind of spam that other people might 
possibly be seeing and how the DNS might or might not be involved, 
you really don't have a leg to stand on.


	Personally, since your first name isn't Paul, or Eric, or some of 
the various other names I am familiar with, I don't think there's 
much chance of this.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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