I'm pretty sure it was me who coined the phrase "two wrongs won't make a spammer repent," many years ago.

Blue Security's stupid idea to exert "revenge" against spammers by attacking their web sites has been generating a lot of chatter; I'd planned to write something about it soon, but as often happens, John Levine beat me to it (and probably did a better job than I would have.)

What's really interesting, though, is that someone from Blue Security left a comment on John's site. I wonder where they got their so-called "experts," when all of the actual e-mail industry experts are busily discussing how dumb their technique is....

This is one of Doug Otis's favorite rants, but I'll try to explain it in fewer than 54 paragraphs. *grin*

Today, all of our spam / not spam decisions are based on one or more of the following criteria:

• source IP address
• guesswork
• content comparison

Most of the time, any decisions made about the trustworthiness of the source IP address are based on guesswork too, but there just simply isn't anything else we can rely on about a message.

Politically and technically accurate (or close enough for a wide audience) -- very nice change after the rash of lame articles we've seen recently.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/07/14/microsoft-yahoo-spam-cx_fr_0714spam.html?partner=rss