The Biggest Challenges Facing Spam-Fighters
Conversations with leading message filtering companies provide insight into the battle for e-mail security.
False Positives
My biggest problem with today’s antispam systems is the amount of false positives that they generate—mail that is not spam but is nevertheless classified as such. Browsing through my spam folder, I recently found invitations to review a paper for a conference (followed by nasty e-mails asking why I had not sent in my review); a dozen messages from a website for which I had lost a password (I had repeatedly clicked on the “password reset” button); e-mail from Sprint that my phone bill is available to view.
I try to minimize the impact of misclassified e-mail by keeping my spam messages forever. Although I may need to reevaluate this policy if my personal spam levels rise to 90 percent, right now hard drive capacities are growing faster than spam levels. And I’ve had too many important e-mail messages misidentified as spam, only to discover them weeks or months later.
Simson Garfinkel, CISSP, is at Harvard University researching computer forensics and human thought. Send feedback to machineshop@cxo.com.
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