[Mimedefang] Fw: [Asrg] user-level blacklisting patented

[Chris Myers]

As posted to the (moribund) IETF Anti-Spam Research Group mailing list.

FWIW...

Chris Myers
Networks By Design

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Peter Kay
To: asrg at ietf.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 8:31 AM
Subject: [Asrg] user-level blacklisting patented


Well, after nearly 6 years and lots of hand wringing, we finally were 
awarded US patent 6,868,498 for our user-level blacklisting as long-ago 
disclosed to the ASRG in 
http://www.shaftek.org/publications/asrg-ipr.html#4.2 .

USPTO link: 
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=6,868,498.WKU.&OS=PN/6,868,498&RS=PN/6,868,498

We even got a little bit of coverage from our local press 
http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2005/03/14/daily22.html?f=et71

We take the mail-from/rcpt-to pair to decide whether to return an error 
before the DATA command is accepted.

We've taken this core technology and developed and entire suite of 
applications around it, including challenge/response, programmable email 
addresses (PEAs), and greylisting.  Works extremely well and we've got > 
8000 end-users on it with > 2M emails/day passing through our software.

Now before everyone goes off and rants about the incompetency of the US 
patent office and the existence of prior art, keep in mind we invented this 
technique in Jan of 2000. Back then the only thing around was lousy 
keyword-based content filtering.

While many on this list will undoubtedly rant about how what we do sucks, I 
can tell you end-users that employ our suite simply don't get any spam at 
all and they don't have a quarantine folder to review either. And because we 
kill the session before DATA, we also do our little part in saving the 
Internet because this approach conserves bandwith across the network and 
reclaims wasted infrastructure.

We certainly can't claim to have solved the spam problem, but our users will 
certainly tell you they love it and don't get any spam at all.

Peter
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