Privacy Digest

Spam's End? Maybe, if Time Allows - New York Times - Via New York Times :

Recently he has taken on the challenge of e-mail spam. This year he founded Abaca, a company with a new approach in the crowded market for stopping junk electronic mail.

Abaca claims that it can filter out 99 percent of all spam, and supports the claim with a money-back guarantee. According to the result of an independent survey last February by Opus One, a computer industry consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., that would be significantly better than the results of six leading spam blockers.

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He has been thinking about the spam problem for a number of years and has several patents covering other approaches, but Mr. Kirsch said he had hit on the idea underlying Abaca — profiling the recipient of e-mail rather than the sender — quite by accident.

“We were sitting around thinking of ways to obfuscate the description about how our system worked so the spammers would be misdirected,” he said. “So I came up with receiver reputation as something that might sound plausible. Then as I thought about it more and more, the more sense it made to me.”

The approach underlying the Abaca technique is the recognition that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique. It is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By assessing the combined reputations of the recipients of any individual message, the Abaca system determines the “spaminess” of a particular message. Mr. Kirsch asserts this provides a high degree of accuracy in deciding whether the message is spam.

Unlike most of its competitors, he said, Abaca’s technology does not require a training period, is language independent and is faster than many competitors because it does not scan the entire contents of a message to determine whether it is spam.

Mr. Kirsch has invested about $5 million in developing his idea, and he said he expects Abaca to reach profitability by the middle of next year.

“I have to admit it sounds innovative and novel,” said Sunil Paul, the founder of Brightmail, one of the leading providers of antispam technology, which was sold to Symantec in 1997 for $370 million.

(Read Original Article - Via New York Times .)