With results showing spam loads falling as high as 80 percent without false positives, testing for Spamsquelcher.com has finished testing, according to developer and anti-spam activist group ePrivacyGroup.
SpamSquelcher operates on random samplings of incoming e-mail that can sometimes block legitimate e-mail, but ePrivacyGroup insists that the program lets all the e-mail through, even the spam. The trick, ePrivacyGroup said, is that SpamSquelcher slows down the bulk mail to the point where spammers catch on that their materials take hours and even days to process and go through, causing them to give up the connection and avoid the Internet service provider in question.
"In fact, most of the spam directed at a SpamSquelcher-protected network won't even leave the spammer's computer," according to ePrivacyGroup chief technology officer David Brussin.
Aristotle.net hosted the tests. Its director of Internet service provider services, Carl Shivers, said bandwidth and CPU untilization in their filtering servers dropped immediately by 80 percent when Aristotle installed SpamSquelcher. "That's the first time ever that our spam load has gone down," Shivers said in a June 17 announcement. "SpamSquelcher really gives you control over what is happening so spammers can't come in and steal all your bandwidth and overload your servers."
"For the first time, networks can reduce spam load and achieve a dramatic reduction of email resources," said ePrivacyGroup president Vincent Schiavone in the announcement.
"Until today, the most effective way to stop spam was to throw expensive resources at it: staff, servers, bandwidth, blacklisting and filtering," Schiavone conitnued. "These crude methods require blocking off whole sections of the Internet, accepting tons of spam then filtering it, and unacceptable false positive rates."
Aristotle agreed a month ago to be the testing host for SpamSquelcher, and Shivers told reporters the results were astonishing to him. "I had three filtering servers and we were still getting killed," before putting the program in, he said, adding he was usually liable to spend about two-thirds of his own working hours just handling spam, and that spammers were consuming "whatever bandwidth I could provide."
