SPAM is without a doubt a cancer of the Internet, with 60+ percent of mail now classified as SPAM, if something is not done soon, e-mail will go the way of the Dodo. On an average day I waste about 30 minutes a day scanning my junk directory looking for possible real e-mail that was classified as SPAM by accident, that’s about 2 weeks a year that I won’t get back.

Some really smart sorts at a Queensland University (Australia) have come up with a new method of letting in the good and blocking the bad. The system is a firewall that uses statistical analyses to determine what’s good, and what’s not. Statistical Analyses is nothing new in SPAM detection, pretty much everyone is using it nowadays. However these guys look at an e-mail as a whole rather then the sum of its parts. The ability to do that is the difference between blocking an ad e-mail, (SPAM) from an e-mail detailing the same subject matter, but not in a commercial sense. (In other words, it will catch SPAM about Viagra, but would learn not to block an e-mail about the benefits of Viagra that wasn’t trying to sell it.) Apparently the testing is to the point where out of 25,000 e-mails, there was only one misclassification. That’s allot better then most of the SPAM solutions I’ve seen.

Now all they have to do is find some people to hand over some dollars so they can turn it into a commercial product. Good luck to them, I loath spammers more then I do bad lawyers.

You can read the full article at News.com.au.

Regards

Franki

This article was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2004 at 6:17 pm