"One of the measures of interest is the size of the "free license to abuse" window. Is the window between detectable illicit action and termination long enough to get off a profitable phishing or spamming run? Is the initial screening process left so open that numerous such incidents are going to keep occuring? Ok, so noted in the service provider's Vetting Effectiveness Profile."   more »

DCC offers an IP based reputation score given as the percentage of "bulk" mail seen from that IP. The IP reputation scoring is only available on the proprietary commercial version of DCC, according to http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/reputations.html

The following is presented to encourage comments and discussion about a short research project designed to illumiate the existing state ...   more »

Excerpt

Classification may be the work of Reputation Collectors, or of Reputation Aggregators, or perhaps ideally an open system that can handle a "source" record. Source is who put this record in, who thinks the classification is X.

You can then choose which source(s) you will use/trust. You could selectively drop (ignore) sources you find you don't want to trust. You could set up your own interpretation / voting:

- Source "ReSpam" says this sender is a school

- Source "Montgomery Report" says this sender allows anonymous webmail signups and has no outbound rate limiting.

I am not suggestion that this classification system become a reputation system unto itself, with evidence files or an unlimited number of data points. Rather that it stick to a narrowly defined area of "classifications useful in differentiating characteristics of email sources." Other reputation collectors could reference the ID or classification numbers in this system if they wished to, and attach other data points within their own databases.   more »

My favored predictive collectors focus on factors that can be measured before the message is accepted, even before the first spam from a new run is accepted. I also like predictive collectors that focus on positive or "good" characteristics rather than characteristics of "bad" senders.   more »