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Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 406
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Some ideas on stopping spam
OK, I was thinking of ways to stop spam, and I think I have a few ideas. Of course, one of the best, most practical way today is simply to use a service like Mailshell, which lets you just make as many addresses as necessary, and then sends them all to your real address. I used to get a ton of spam, then I changed my address, and I'm careful who I give it to, so I don't get any spam. But if I did start to get any, I'd get MailShell in a heartbeat (no, I'm not affiliated with them, or anything). Still, here are some of my musings:
-How do spammers make money? In the end, it's from two sources: selling addresses, and from people who buy their products. Selling addresses wouldn't really be lucrative if no one bought products from spammers, so how can you stop people from buying products from them? How about a mass media comapign, telling people to, whatever they do, not buy anything from spam ads? The main problem I can see with that (besides getting funding, of course if you got a few companies like AOL and MS together, it wouldn't really be a problem anymore) is that spam only has a purchase amount of like 1/1000 recipients, if that many. That means that it'd be very difficult to reach these people who respond to spam, and on most people it'd be wasted. Still, it may help to make spam less lucrative, maybe even a lot less.
-I remember a while back, I saw a service that blocked spam based on whether your email had false headers. Basically, the idea being that virtually all spam has false headers, and all legit mail has legit headers. It sounds interesting, and in concept it could really work, with extremely low false positive/ false negative rates. Could this actually work, or could spammers be able to trick it?
-A simple idea, which may be done already. You have these programs that filter spam using AI, which as opposed to simple rule-based filtering, determines the probability of a message being spam, right? It's reasonable to assume that most false positives would have a high probability of being legit, but not high enough to get past the filter. So, instead of only either deleting spam or putting it in your inbox, why not have a "possible spam" list as well? Maybe put it on the side, like an MS Office Task Pane, so you can ignore it, or scan it for email when you have the time? This would also let the program have more strict filtering, since having false positives would be less important (assuming most of them go in that list).
Well, that's all I have for now. Any other ideas?
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