[LINK] Spam filters don't work shocks new survey

[Adam Todd]

>AT&T WorldNet was using Brightmail's Anti-Spam Solution. But despite
>filtering out some 73 per cent of the spam, it still failed to pick up more
>than a quarter of the junk email being sent out.
>
>AOL and Yahoo! only managed to block 40 per cent and 36 per cent of spam
>respectively.

And this is any surprise?

The Internet is becoming more and more every day a "DENY ALL, ALLOW known" 
type of environment because less than 1% of the users wish to abuse the 
resource.

I've ben running ANTI SPAM procedures sine 1986, in fact wrote some fo the 
first code, but none the less, the spamers are getting ahead of me.

In the last 3 months, I now see 20 - 30 SPAM's a week making it to my 
in-box, yet parsing the log files shows over 2000 a week being attempted 
delivery.

ISPs who run "as affective as possible" SPAM filters tend to report like 
results when suing the filters I use.

Sadly this does in some cases limit the ability for many of the free server 
styled environments being able to deliver their email.

IN the last year I've had only TWO service providers contact me regards 
spam blocking and both had open relays and no spam filtering in 
place.  Following discussions they now both have private relay for internal 
subnet only and a fairly good array of anti spam measures.

I don't think we can ever make it perfect with many new server installs 
being done a week (even per day) by inexperienced people on permanent links 
around the world.  Admittedly there are three operating systems 
particularly at fault with a default open relay configuration.