Singapore-based BoxSentry has historically been known as a challenge/response spam filter vendor. Readers will probably be aware that I'm no fan of C/R.
As time goes by, BoxSentry has gradually de-emphasized C/R, but until recently it was still sending challenges for a small but significant proportion of the spam it received -- and hence was sending unsolicited "replies" to people who had never sent email to the BoxSentry user.
Manish Goel, BoxSentry's CEO, confirmed to me that his company no longer uses C/R. That's great news for Internet users. Well done, Manish; I know that I and others have been thorns in your side for a while about this; I appreciate your good humour in our occasional, heated debates!Manish also brought other news. While beefing up their technology base -- in part to compensate for the loss of the C/R layer -- the company has developed new techniques to better identify false positives.
BoxSentry has wrapped the new techniques in a product it's calling LogiQ. The idea is that it can run alongside a traditional spam filter and automatically retrieve any false positives it finds.
As an illustration, Manish offered a "typical" example: over the test period, a deployed spam filter from one of the well-known vendors delivered 11,500 legitimate messages, but LogicQ found an additional 680 false positives in the filter's quarantine. That's a roughly average false positive rate, in my experience. Not the exactly state-of-the-art, but pretty representative of deployed spam filters. It might equate to one false positive every week per user.
Manish says that 100% of the false positives identified with these new techniques really are false positives -- although they may not catch all of them.
A bold claim; I'm looking forward to digging into the details of the techniques under NDA...
2 comments:
s/LogicQ/LogiQ/
Merci.
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