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June 16, 2005
Simon Waters Makes Our Case for Us
Simon Waters, at CircleID, discusses greylisting as an antispam strategy in a recent article. Quoting a few bits out of context, you can see he's making a strong argument for the approach we have taken with enemieslist.
Alas greylisting is a flawed remedy, it merely requires the spambots to act more like email servers and it will fail, and eventually they will. [...] Greylisting may scale to big email servers, but it doesn't scale to a lot of the population using it. [...] Just don't everyone start using it, please. [...] Any solution to the supposed "spam problem" that doesn't deal with the large number of compromised boxes will at best move the problem elsewhere.
After a discussion of how spam isn't an email problem (he's right - it's a problem with many facets, and if we fix email it will move to other avenues and media) he ends with a confession that he's no longer feeling "so smug", and leaves us with:
One of the basic tenets of both war, and security, is that it is almost impossible to defend against an opponent with far greater resources, we have to deny those resources to our opponents, before we can hope to win the war.
And that is exactly what this project is attempting to do. if ISPs will not block their own users, we'll make an effort to block them here.
Posted by schampeo at June 16, 2005 7:01 PM