Graham's spam filter

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Fri Aug 23 00:53:17 EDT 2002


Heiko Wundram wrote:

> Err... I'm not trying to read their mail; that's why I propose only
> keeping the spam data on the central server. What each person
> considers
> spam doesn't necessarily vary very much; it basically is just an eMail
> that does unsolicited advertising/unsolicited sending of
> dialer-programs/unsolicited sending of virii.

You're missing my point.  If the spam filter involves connecting to a
remote server and sending it each of your emails in order for the server
to determine whether it is spam or not and respond, that server can be
hijacked by a third party in order to record other peoples' emails.

Even when you're debugging the server, you yourself could be looking at
clients' emails in order to determine whether or not the server is
working properly.  The design _itself_ is what's suspect, not your
motives in particular.

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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 A lambda calculus explorer in Python.



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