This was an interesting article regarding a different method of filtering out spam. It is too bad the developer has not a whole lot of time left to him though.

It still amazes me that somehow the default position is to sit back and find ways to work around what is possibly causing the greatest annoyance to the greatest number of good people by the smallest number of criminals since wide area networks began. International organised crime is involved. Law breaking on a massive scale. Thousands of ISPs are complicit. Suicides have resulted. And violence.

But the default reaction to it is as to the rain, or the bore on the bus: there's nothing we can do about it, so we'll spend millions (billions) on workarounds. Amazing.

Thanks all the more to Jeff-like approaches!

I came here to post a pointer to this notion of "receiver reputation" rating, too.

"The concept of receiver reputation is based on the fact that different people receive different amounts of spam and legitimate email. When analyzing a message, each receiver’s percentage of spam versus legitimate email (his or her reputation) is an estimate of whether the message is spam or legitimate. Essentially, if the message is sent to users who typically receive a high percentage of spam, the message is more likely to be spam. However, if the message is sent to users who typically receive a low percentage of spam, the message is more likely to be legitimate. Aggregating the reputations of all recipients of a particular message, therefore, is equivalent to combining those users’ rating power to estimate the legitimacy of the sender and the message. In a receiver reputation system, the key determinant of whether a message is spam or legitimate is not the identity of the sender or the content of the email, but the reputations of the email recipients, individually and collectively."

I can't see how something like this could work all by itself, but it certainly seems to be a way to deal with borderline cases.

[and msealey, you're of course correct in observing it would be better to stop spam from being sent from a few rather than for millions to protect themselves from what has been sent. But the same is true of armed robbery.

I confess to having a morbid fascination as to why this doesn't happen. In almost any other sphere of life (the scale of spam is many orders of magnitude higher than any other crime), enforcement would be routine by now.

...and pandemic murder, thuggery, property theft, untold suffering and the misappropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars could be ended almost overnight if governments legalized and taxed marijuana, cocaine, hallucinogens and heroin.

Meanwhile I need to filter my spam and take measures against theft and mugging.

so I'm kind of interested by this recipient reputation thing.

Hmm, I have to throw in my two cents here. (Mounting soapbox) I have to disagree with you here, I'm afraid. I know that you're probably aware of what happened to the Chinese when they had legal opium dens. Massive addiction, and the entire country on the verge of collapse. A war was fought in the 1800's to try to put an end to the massive Chinese opium trade, and rid the country of this problem. Legal addictive drugs? No way say I.

I have had a brother, and several friends die as a direct result of their addiction to these substances. They died because they were addicted to these drugs, and COULD NOT stop using them, even as their lives and bodies wasted away. I've also watched in horror as other friend's lives were destroyed by even casual use of these substances. I personally would have no problem putting a 30-06 slug through the skull of anyone that made their living selling illegal drugs. (Putting away firearms, and dismounting soapbox).