...more recent posts
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.)