Cam has an interesting thought on the possibilities for anti-spam services. But what about a service that gives you an email address - very cheap but not free. Then anybody with an email account on that system also gets a central email address where they can redirect any spam they do get. These spams are then used to create a master profile. Every incoming email for every different account passes through the filter created by aggregating all the spams received by everyone on the system. Any incoming mail that matches anything in the central deposit is thrown out. You'd still get spam, but if the system grew large I would think it would be very infrequent. With enough people it would almost always be the case that someone else would have gotten that spam first. My guess is this might be very good to perfect at not producing false positives, while still being pretty good at stopping spam. And the real problem with spam filters is that you don't want false positives (you don't want even one in a hundred real messages deleted before you see it.)
Cool. This is a better version of what I was imagining: "Folsom was co-designed by developers Vipul Ved Prakash and Jordan Ritter - one of the people behind the music-swapping site Napster. It will be marketed to email-handling companies by a US-based start-up company called Cloudmark in May 2002.
The peer-to-peer part of the project is based on a free tool released by Prakash in 2001 called Razor. When a recipient marks a message as spam, the program automatically assigns it a small signature based on its content and forwards this to one of numerous distributed servers on the internet.
These signatures are then automatically downloaded by other members of the network and used to block other copies of the same message.
The machine learning part of Folsom identifies new spam by looking at the words and phrases in previous messages and making a statistical judgement about a new mail. Existing anti-spam systems can rely on human technicians to keep databases of known spam messages updated. Other anti-spam programs block a message if it contains a particular word or phrase."
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- jim 1-07-2002 11:32 pm
Cool. This is a better version of what I was imagining:
- jim 4-10-2002 12:11 am