Derrick
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- Joined
- Nov 22, 2010
- Messages
- 5,085
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Even the most inept computer users will probably agree with the fact that email is easily the most groundbreaking development that has come out of the internet. As with anything that has amazing benefits – someone will find a way to abuse the system and get more out of the system at the expense of other users.
The migration of the paper junkmail from our post box to our inbox was inevitable. The malicious and downright criminal methods that these bulk advertisers have used to force this advertising material on us was a little unexpected however.
This has now become the daily war for almost every email user on the planet: Wading through massive quantities of bulk advertising for cheap drugs, amazing stocks, instant degrees and online gambling establishments to try and find that important mail from you boss. On the other extreme you have people fighting loosing battles with the tech support department trying to get that email from a new million rand customer to just deliver.
Broadly speaking there are three categories of email: Black mail – all of that mail that is quite clearly not legitimate. White mail – the really important stuff from you bank and business partners as well as anyone else with whom you regularly communicate. Grey mail – finally, all that remains in the proverbial grey area.
All mail starts off in the grey area and then it is the task of mail filtering software to decide what to do with all the mail. Unfortunately – however – this same mail filtering software has been developed with the intention of picking out all the black mail with very little attention paid to anything on the white end of the scale. When looking at filtering technologies it is quite clear that most of the mail that arrives in your inbox is never given consideration beyond its grey status.
One illustration of this is the fact that there are hundreds of DNS blocklists published and maintained on the net – with a number of them commanding considerable market power. Yet there is not a single DNS whitelist that is widely know or used.
Other recent developments in email technology such as SPF and DKIM are also prime candidates for providing whitelisting to email. They are however used more often to reject bad mail than to develop a whitelist policy.
Whitelisting of course has its downfalls. Any mail senders with good whitelist reputations become the target of the hacker/spammer workers to obtain a reliable delivery path for their mails. That said – why should security conscious server administrators not be complemented for their good work. Smilar to how the bad administrators get penalised when their servers get blacklisted for mail abuse?
For mail to continue to be a reliable business tool – much work has to be done. The race between server administrators and spammers is nowhere near its finish line – but every opportunity for the good to get ahead of the bad must be taken. Providing a network of trust through whitelisting technology could just be the next energy boost that we need to keep ahead.
The migration of the paper junkmail from our post box to our inbox was inevitable. The malicious and downright criminal methods that these bulk advertisers have used to force this advertising material on us was a little unexpected however.
This has now become the daily war for almost every email user on the planet: Wading through massive quantities of bulk advertising for cheap drugs, amazing stocks, instant degrees and online gambling establishments to try and find that important mail from you boss. On the other extreme you have people fighting loosing battles with the tech support department trying to get that email from a new million rand customer to just deliver.
Broadly speaking there are three categories of email: Black mail – all of that mail that is quite clearly not legitimate. White mail – the really important stuff from you bank and business partners as well as anyone else with whom you regularly communicate. Grey mail – finally, all that remains in the proverbial grey area.
All mail starts off in the grey area and then it is the task of mail filtering software to decide what to do with all the mail. Unfortunately – however – this same mail filtering software has been developed with the intention of picking out all the black mail with very little attention paid to anything on the white end of the scale. When looking at filtering technologies it is quite clear that most of the mail that arrives in your inbox is never given consideration beyond its grey status.
One illustration of this is the fact that there are hundreds of DNS blocklists published and maintained on the net – with a number of them commanding considerable market power. Yet there is not a single DNS whitelist that is widely know or used.
Other recent developments in email technology such as SPF and DKIM are also prime candidates for providing whitelisting to email. They are however used more often to reject bad mail than to develop a whitelist policy.
Whitelisting of course has its downfalls. Any mail senders with good whitelist reputations become the target of the hacker/spammer workers to obtain a reliable delivery path for their mails. That said – why should security conscious server administrators not be complemented for their good work. Smilar to how the bad administrators get penalised when their servers get blacklisted for mail abuse?
For mail to continue to be a reliable business tool – much work has to be done. The race between server administrators and spammers is nowhere near its finish line – but every opportunity for the good to get ahead of the bad must be taken. Providing a network of trust through whitelisting technology could just be the next energy boost that we need to keep ahead.