New Method of Spam Filtering

Alephcat writes "A simple and easily implemented scheme for combating e-mail spam has been devised by two researchers in the United States. P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles use their method to exploit the structure of social networks to quickly determine whether a given message comes from a friend or a spammer. The method works for only about half of all e-mails received - but in all of those cases, it sorts the mail into the right category. The article was published on Nature magazines website earlier today."

Comments

Interesting

[jchawk]

It would be interesting if Google could find away for this idea to work with Orkut.com, since users of this service are typically connected to many other people who are not spammers. :-)

Bugger Off!

[ackthpt]

You take food away from a spammer and his children. Don't block spam, or else you hate childeren. You don't hate children... do you?

You know darn well that this will only increase employment in the Spam Technology sector and is a good thing.

Seriously, Spammers are often a step ahead and lately a lot of spam I'm getting is masked to look like Amazon orders or closed ebay auctions. I haven't ordered anything from Amazon (USA) in ages, but I till have to peek to see if someone has cracked my account and ordered something. Just expect the harder they are pressed, the harder spammers will press back by sinking to new lows.

Good idea

[Schezar]

After reading this, I realized that a good 90% of the email I receive is either from someone I've had previous contact with, or else someone 1 or at most 2 degrees of separation from one of those people. I never get mail worth reading from total strangers. Anything important is always linked back to me in some way.

It should be interesting to see how this method plays out. (Now, I don't know why I even bothered with that last sentence. Everyone says that about every new spam-filtery thing. ((Don't know why I bothered with that last sentence either. Work is slow today I suppose.)) )

Re:huh?

[CeleronXL]

Well you can run mail through a system like that first, pulling out the mail that is definitely not spam and shuffling it away to the Inbox. Then run it through a different kind of spam system, such as a system like SpamBayes, and you cut it down even more.

On its own it doesn't sound like it works well, but you can couple it with already-existing systems to boost accuracy.

Heading the wrong way

[Muddie]

This sounds like the whole "Friends and Family" network from AT&T a few years ago, and now Verizon's "In" network thing, but with email and exclusive instead of "Free calls to friends on 'the list'".

Pretty soon, you will have to send an MD5 hash of your DNA from a static IP address that is reversible and supply 5 refrences all in a PGP encrypted letter, along with a copy of your passport and birth certificate.

When it's more work to block spam than stop it, you have to ask what is going wrong. Maybe if we somehow figured out wonderful technologies to *stop* spammers instead of blocking them, we'd be getting towards the ultimate goal. This is much like throwing money at a problem to bandage it, not fix it. The solution, however, also has to be easier for end users, who are doing nothing wrong. Why is every solution harder for end users, but just a 'bump in the road' for spammers? Am I missing something?

Spammers already defeat this (partially)

[xleeko]

Spammers already sort addresses by site in order to take advantage of this effect. They forge the from address as someone else from your site on the theory that you know them and would whitelist them.

In fact, this has provided me with a kind of "honeypot", since I now check for the addresses of several people who are long gone from my site. If I see their address its gotta be spam!

- Dave