Using Email Networks as P2P Spam Filters

Oscar Boykin writes "New Scientist is running a story on using the social network in email as a P2P network. The idea is that email networks have structure that is conducive to a type of search called percolation search . This means email clients could query the social network of email users to filter spam. This story is based on a preprint available."

Comments

Secure?

[geomon]

The authors propose that their system have access to inbound and outbound contacts. For trusted email accounts, that might work. But what about email accounts that people may want to creat to sheild their identity (political dissidents, whistleblowers). They would have to live outside of the spam protection network and would, I assume, be seed accounts for spammers.

Am I missing something in this analysis?

Re:Secure?

[seoYak]

I don't think that i'll trade my privacy for a reduction in spam.

Re:Secure?

[rescendent]

Also you would not be able to be emailed by people who you haven't already approved the email address; would they have to phone you first?

For example:
People who change email address (Gmail, dropping a spammed email)
People legitimately contacting you (Old friend, people wanting to know more about your website etc.)
etc.

It would be like setting your telephone to only accept certain phone numbers and scrapping the phonebook. Bad for people, terrible for business.

Though I suppose spam is worse because it requires less effort and cost to contact 1000 people than using the telephone would... I've only changed email address 8 times... LOL

Re:Nice...but not necessary

[winkydink]

One or two per day out of how many? 3? 5? 1000?

Isn't this how Yahoo works

[CrazyJim1]

You click a multi-user message as marked as spam, then it turns into spam for everyone else too.

Ob

[lheal]

In Korea, only old people get P2P spam.

Actually, I think we should find a way to attach the same stigma to spam customers that we do to the spammers. Why do spam customers not have to go to jail? They're as much the problem as the spammers.

I can see something like having all the spam customers' names published online, so you google for "spam" and "lheal" and up pops my list of purchases. The other spammers then get a very clean list of people to spam. Over time, the net would be segregated into those who like spam and those who don't.

Yeah, unworkable idea, but so are all the others.

Re:Secure?partially...

[spectrokid]

You could collect email adresses in a hashed form, just like passwords are stored on a server. You would be able to check if the sender is in the list, but not be able to "un-hash" the list back into real adresses. The way to get around it would be for spammers to attach their sender adresses to these funny mails people do like to forward to their friends.

Re:Nice...but not necessary

[geoffspear]

That's a nice theory, but it seems more likely that the more effective spam filtering gets, the more spam will be sent. If it takes 100x more messages to get the same results, the spammers will just send 100x more messages. And they'll need to turn even more machines into zombies to do it.

Re:Nice...but not necessary

[conteXXt]

glad you told me. I was happily using it.

gentoo implimentation of courier-imap in ssl mode.

I have had no problems with it.

NOTE: 3 users, all me. NOT in production environs

Any suggestions for a better replacement?