From: Vipul V. P. <ma...@vi...> - 2001-12-28 07:32:58
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Hi Ian, On Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 05:36:52PM -0800, Ian Clarke wrote: > Hi, I am new to Razor, but have been looking for an effective way to > decrease the amount of spam in my mailbox for a while now, and Razor > looks promising. > > Some questions, apologies if they are dumb: > > If Razor uses a hash to detect spam, couldn't this be easily > circumvented by adding some randomness (an extra /n here, and extra > whitespace there, or even just some random variations in the text > ("Hello Friend", "Dear Friend", "Howdy", "Hi" etc) to each spam? Yes, but as Gregor pointed out, this makes spam more than an order of magnitude more expensive to inject. Nevertheless, we plan to switch over to nilsimsa hashes soon (search on google for nilsimsa homepage). Nilsimsa hashes for small mutations in text are the same, and when they are different, they can be compared to determine the percentage of difference in the source texts. > If Razor becomes very popular, isn't there a danger that the cost of > operating the central servers could get too high? We run 2 servers at the moment, the protocol allows for distributed servers, but we don't run more because servers are not really ready for wide-scale deployment and 2 servers are sufficient for the kind of load we are seeing now. > Has anyone tried to periodically filter their inbox with Razor before > email is read, this would catch spam that wasn't reported by the time > the email was received, but was reported before it is read by the user? > Of course, this would further increase the load on the central servers. I am not sure if anyone is doing this; I am not. I would be more inclined to integrate Razor into POP/IMAP daemons, so that mail would be checked just before one picks it for manual processing. best, vipul. -- Vipul Ved Prakash | "I almost died, but I made it, so I'm not so Software Design Artist | serious about formal-wear anymore." http://vipul.net/ | -- Gene Boggs |