Author: Marc Perkel Date: To: exim-users Subject: [exim] Automatic Whitelist Generation - Why wouldn't this work?
OK - here's an idea I'm rolling around in my brain and thinking this
could work to massively automatically generate white lists of IP
addresses from companies that generate no spam at all. This could be
used not only to greatly reduce false positives, but also you reduce
system load. Any IP listed is ham and no need for further testing.
One thing that spammers can't spoof is RDNS. So if the RNDS of an IP is
xxx.xxx.amd.com then we know the email is ham. Suppose that we start
with a list of companies that we know that any email that comes from
those hosts will always be ham then we can create a dynamically
generated whitelist based on host IP addresses that come from the list.
A query comes in to a specially written DNS server where the RNDS is
looked up and it's xxx.ibm.com and ibm.com is in the list of blessed ham
hosts. We would need a fast way of getting rid of the subhost part to do
the lookup, stripping the xxx part off to get the domain, . We would
then return a yes response and cache the data in a local database.
The database could contain tens of thousands of domains that never send
spam. How would we get this list? For now I'm doing it manually but it
could possible be done by tracking ham and spam hist over time of
verious IP addresses and looking for patterns of behavior that would
indicate that indicate that the source is 100% clean.
Of course this wouldn't solve domains like yahoo, hotmail, comcast, and
other mixed source spam but it would allow a lot of email to be
preclassified as ham without further testing.
