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Subject: Re: [Razor-users] What's wrong with the Razor servers now?
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To: "Gregory Sloop" <gregs@sloop.net>
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Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 13:36:15 -0700


On Thursday, August 8, 2002, at 09:05  AM, Gregory Sloop wrote:

> I agree (I think)....
>
> But gaming the system, for any system, (spamassassin included) is extra
> work.

Yes, it's definitely extra work.  The question is how much extra 
work, both up front, and then on an ongoing basis.  I know 
nothing about how the trust system is working (still waiting for 
that long-promised server code to be published), but now that 
it's been turned on, and the more info that's coming out about 
it, the more concerned I'm becoming that it's extremely easy to 
game; that the initial amount of work to set up a gaming agent 
is low, and that once it's set up, it can be "fire and forget" 
in terms of continuing to operate in a way that's not easy to 
distinguish from real user behavior.

> Sure, you can find a way to work almost any system, but few 
> users (spammers)
> will actually take the time to game the system.

Another concern I have with the way the system might be working 
is that it might not actually require very many gamers at all to 
utterly undermine the whole system.  There are a certain number 
of possible universes where the trust system is very sensitive 
to liars, or misclassifiers of "gray" mail, or both.  It's not 
clear yet whether this universe is one of those or not.

> That means that we might have a system that is less than 100% 
> effective, but
> perfect accuracy and effectiveness comes at a prohibitive cost. 
> (Complex
> systems, time numbing hours of coding etc.)

You do need a certain level of accuracy though, or the filter is 
not economically worthwhile.  If you only filter 75% of spam, 
you're wasting your time.  Some people receive on the order of a 
10:1 ratio of spam:real mail -- 75% means the ratio adjusts to 
5:2 which is still shitty.  95% makes it 1:2, which is better.  
99% makes it 1:10 which is quite nice.  As the global ratio of 
spam:mail rises, this problem gets somewhat more important.  
With an order of magnitude worsening of the incoming spam:real 
ratio, 100:1, 99% effective still works OK.  75% effective is 
now really, really shitty.


> I can't vouch for Razor currently, as I'm not at all 
> knowledgeable. But I
> suspect the current route was picked because it was fairly simple to
> impliment, and it (at least some think) should work decently - if not
> completely without fault.

Time will tell.  Time will also tell how good the system is at 
adjusting over time to gaming strategies.

> I put up with some garbage results in SA, simply because it 
> blocks most of
> my spam, without too many false positives.

SA definitely has a non-zero FP rate, and always will have.  I 
would argue that any system will have a non-zero FP rate, 
including the "no filter" filter -- humans make mistakes too 
sometimes!  As spammer strategies evolve over time though, I'm 
fairly sure that SA will be able to adjust and compensate.  If 
spammers figure out how to easily pollute the SpamNet trust 
system, I'm not sure how easy it'll be to replace the trust 
system with something else.

> Perhaps Craig is just theorizing, but I just thought I'd offer my two
> ity-bits.

Lots of theorizing, most of it based on little data.  The key 
premises I'm worrying about though are:

1. Trust system is easy to pollute
2. Trust system is not personal, which makes the assumption that 
all honest voters agree on what constitutes spam


> Somthing simple, and actually implimented, that works 
> reasonably well, is
> better than somthing that works perfectly, but will never be 
> implimented
> because of it's cost. (The rub is that everyone defines 
> "reasonably well" in
> dramatically different ways - *grin* as evidenced my the masses 
> that think
> Microsoft's stuff works "resaonably well" _bah_ - [but it does 
> keep me fully
> employed 'sigh']

Razor2 seems to have been a long time in coming, apparently is 
quite resource intensive (judging by Cloudmark's fundraising 
efforts), and doesn't currently work.  It has great promise, and 
I'm hoping that once the wrinkles are worked through, it'll add 
another powerful tool in the war on spam -- I'm just concerned 
that it's getting off on the wrong foot and might not be able to 
recover.

C



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