regarding spam...

["Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () nfr com>]

Out of 30 messages in the input queue yesterday 30 were spam.
27 of those were korean or chinese.

I'm trying to think of ways to deal with spam E-mails and
have been kicking around a few ideas with some friends of
mine. Most of the truly effective ways we can imagine to
deal with spam rely on spam-knowledge propagation: in other
words a human being someplace in the mix says "this is spam"
and based on that determination causes the offending message
to disappear from all mailboxes.

So, a side effect of this approach is a 'web of trust' with
respect to noise email. :) Suppose I tell the mail system
"I trust Dodge Mumford's judgement regarding what is spam"
then my mail system will automatically move into my spam
folder all emails that Dodge moves into his spam folder.
We might choose to look out for eachother in a reflexive
relationship, or we might choose to additionally trust an
outside source, etc, etc.

It occurs to me that this would be pretty easy to implement,
with a bit of small extra kludgery. You could build it right
into an imap server by having it apply the extra processing
when someone moves a message into a folder called "spam" -
in fact this way _one_ person in an organization could keep
an up-to-date set of Eudora filters that would be leveraged
by everyone in that spam trust ring.

Does anyone know if this is already being done? Does anyone
see any really compelling reason it wouldn't work?

mjr. 
---
Marcus J. Ranum          Chief Technology Officer, NFR Security, Inc.
Work:                    http://www.nfr.com
Personal:                http://www.ranum.com

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