Earlier today, in a thread titled “More Information Regarding the ISOC Anti-spam Project” Vint Cert posted this to the ISOC mailing list. I thought it worth sharing.

Stopping spam at the source is hard. Filtering fake source IP addresses may stop some spambot generation but I think the only proven tactic is filtering. For someone on a slow access line, the filtering has to be done upstream of the access line, not in the endpoint. email services like gmail do a good job of filtering spam. Anyone who wants to provide a filtering service has to put the hosts for email at a point in the network where the communication capacity exceeds the level required to receive and filter the spam. Cloud-based email typically has that kind of capacity. The developing world needs to, variously:

1. increase capacity
2. site its applications in cloud hosts that have capacity
3. make use of third party email that has adequate filtering capacity

vint