04-04-2007

Thwarting Spammers Through Creativity

The ongoing battle against spam brings out some of the most creative problem solving in programmers and system administrators. Techniques like greylisting and bayesian filtering are applied in an attempt to keep the spam problem under control.

A recent behind-the-scenes blog post about The Architecture of Mailinator details some creative problem solving that went into the design of the Mailinator service. By foregoing perfect service in favor of near-perfect service, Mailinator is able to significantly alter its approach to the problem.

Now if this all sounds a bit shaky, as in we might just lose an email now and then – you’re right. But remember, our goal is 99.99% accuracy. Not 100%. That’s an important distinction. The latest incarnation of Mailinator literally runs for months unattended. We do lose emails once in awhile – but its rare and usually involves a server crash. We accept the loss and by far most users never encounter it.

Posted by Matt in creativity, tech | RSS 2.0

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