When I wrote about Knujon last Thursday, I didn't realize that I'd been watching a confirmation of their principles in my own attempts to control junk email. (You'll notice that I'm not using the s-word that rhymes with ham today; apparently that word sets off a lot of your junk mail filters. <sigh>) If you read the white paper referenced in Garth Bruen's email, you'll see that Knujon has been maintaining When I wrote about Knujon last Thursday, I didn’t realize that I’d been watching a confirmation of their principles in my own attempts to control junk email. (You’ll notice that I’m not using the s-word that rhymes with ham today; apparently that word sets off a lot of your junk mail filters. )If you read the white paper referenced in Garth Bruen’s email, you’ll see that Knujon has been maintaining for 4 years that filtering email is the wrong solution for the wrong battle, and that a block and delete strategy just makes the problem worse. This reminds me of the rise of superbugs.Basically, superbugs, of which the best-known example is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, arise as bacteria are incompletely treated with antibiotics. What happens when you kill off 99.9% of the bacteria in your body, and then stop taking the antibiotics? The other 0.1%, which were mutations resistant to the antibiotic, begin to flourish: this is classic natural selection, speeded up immensely by the use of antibiotics. Soon the resistant bacteria spread to others, and the drug companies have to scramble to find another antibiotic. The parallel to email filtering is striking. Every time we block these vermin, they mutate. It’s a losing battle.According to the CDC, the long-term solution for superbugs is to only use antibiotics when they’re really needed, and to always take the full course of antibiotics. That seems like a stopgap to me, since the bacteria will always mutate, but who am I to argue with the CDC?According to the Bruens of Knujon, the long-term solution for cybercrime committed via email is to send the junk email to them, and let them run it through a process called the Policy Enforcement Engine. They then try to determine what the best course of action is. They actually go after the web site owners and shut them down through legal procedural methods. The theory is that if the cyber-vermin can’t complete a sale, they can’t make money, and the junk email should then dry up. I think I’m going to figure out how to send my rejected emails to Knujon automatically. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Software Development