What’s New With Spam?

I’m at the Usenix LISA 2004 conference right now, listening to a really interesting talk by John Graham-Cumming about spam. Here are some interesting links from the presentation:

John Graham-Cumming’s website

The Spammer’s Compendium, a list of the techniques that spammers are currently using.

popfile, John’s free anti-spam program.

One of John’s recent presentations.

John also puts out a bi-weekly newsletter on spam and spam-fighting.

Interesting points: the hard thing these days is not filtering out spam, John says, but not filtering out good mail. When you purchase an anti-spam system, what really matters is not just the false-accept-rate, but the false-reject-rate.