AOL to tax emails...

[IBBoard]

And there was me thinking that it was one of Microsoft's daft ideas that they'd abandonned. But no, AOL has now decided that it's going to try to charge people for sending emails!

At least this time it's only them charging a fee to skip junk-mail filtering instead of charging to send an email, but still, it seems completely wrong for the Internet to be charged like that.

(BBC News article)

[TGSC]

Saw this a while ago. The idea is that they can filter out all 'spam' emails, who won't bother to pay to get sent, whilst 'legitimate' ones will pay, and bypass the filters.

I don't care if they're legitimate buisnesses, I don't want their email anyway! And if spam filters don't work now, how will this new one be any more successful

[IBBoard]

Exactly, it just means that large companies will still be able to spam (just like the American Can-Spam legislation) while small companies can use less and less email marketting.

Having done a bit of Machine Learning coursework on Spam Filtering, you can easily get spam filters up to 99.97% accuracy, you just have to make them personalised rather than generic (although there's some good generic markers that I picked out that let mine get around 98%, I think)

The other good way is Received-SPF headers that GMail uses. It checks whether the sending IP is allowed to send emails on that domain:

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Received-SPF: neutral (gmail.com: 59.32.21.158 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of adelaiida@rasalvatore.com)

Sometimes the spammers will get a failed, and any GMail to GMail gets a passed.

The other option is a Domain-Key Signatures that Yahoo and others use. It allows you to say for certain that the message came from the domain it says it did.

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DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
  s=s1024; d=yahoo.co.uk;
  h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding;
  b=[insert key here]

And according to Yahoo's page on Domain Key Signatures, they can be used both to flag up emails supposedly from a domain that aren't and, if everyone uses them, as a quick and simple way to drop spam mail.