Perhaps my provider’s just great at filtering spam - but I kind of doubt it’s better than the major players (for years I’ve used Zoho for email - and it’s ‘okay’ enough that it’s not worth switching).
because harvesters don't care until one technique gets massive use. if you come up with a unique but simple enough scheme for your sites and keep a few dozen email addresses out of their reach.. they've still gathered a million addresses. it's not really worth their effort to get the last 0.0001% of extra email addresses
so it's best to just not advertise your solution and make sure it doesn't get n any outside traction - if it gets popular the harvesters will defeat it
However, LLMs are quite good at generating spam and I think soon will evade most filters.
If an LLM and make a plausible email, the best another LLM can do is to rank it as plausible. Blackbox creation and detection have to be on the same level.
Perhaps if you said the detection LLM had all your context and websearch. That it could know that a Penny Pollytree at Coco Co isn’t a real person, but… that just seems like burning a ton of coal to detect fraud where the creation LLM was able to easily come up with the fictitious spam cheaply.
The real story here is this will go beyond email verification. That every system we have is going to need to up its security. Paper birth certificates and social security cards and email addresses and all manner of identity is going to need new systems of auth. The challenge will be to prevent authoritarian centralization.
Or buy/rent domains/IPs that have good reputations, as there are services that specializes in just bringing up the reputation for stuff so they can sell it once "good". Same exists for user accounts for various platforms like reddit and so on.
Yes, that is indeed the point of those; "build up reputation -> sell/rent -> someone uses it to burn reputation -> rinse and repeat".
I never got SpamAssassin working very well, but since moving my email hosting to Apple (from my own server), spam has not been a problem.