[Asrg] user-level blacklisting patented

["Peter Kay" <peter at titankey.com>]

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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