[Spambayes] A grassroots auto whitelist

Gary Robinson grobinson at transpose.com
Tue Dec 10 10:15:59 EST 2002


I had a wild idea that I'd like to bounce off the readers of SpamBayes and
Spamflt.

There is a company, Habeas, attempting to leverage trademark and copyright
law to get people to insert a trademarked/copyrighted haiku into their
emails. Then when spammers try it, they can be sued for trademark/copyright
infringement (more here:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454/categories/spam/2002/12/09.html#a200). It's
free for individuals to use the haiku, but corporations have to pay.

I was thinking today that it could be interest to do something less
legalistic, but that would still probably have a certain practical
effectiveness (particularly since I am not thrilled about including their
silly haiku in all my emails).

Suppose we all started putting some character string like ImNotSpam! in our
emails. Then spam filters would come to associate them with non-spam, and
emails with that word in it would have a better chance of getting through.

Of course, spammers could do the same thing, but we could trademark it and
if anybody infringes, gives lawyers the chance to sue in return for all (or
most) of the damages as their contingency fee.

But more effectively, instead of basing it on a simple character string like
ImNotSpam, it could be that we base it on the URL of some antispam resource
like Paul Graham's http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html or the wiki I
started recently, http://spamland.org. (A URL with such a name can also be a
registered trademark.)

Of course, spammers could include such a URL, but wouldn't want to if it
pointed to a potent source of antispam info such as a list of spam filtering
products, and the trademark issue would be an additional danger. So, some
balance would be achieved over time. If it got to be a popular tool for
legitimate individuals to get their emails through, some spammers would use
it, but if they did so on too large a scale they would be in danger of being
sued and if a URL were used, they would also be informing people about how
to deal with spam (the URL could list antispam products etc. as Paul's site
and spamland do).

A URL would also explain what the effort was about exhort people who come to
the page to also start using the token in their emails, so it would be
viral.

I'd be very interested in any thoughts on this.

If readers of these lists wanted to try including such a URL in their
emails, we could get the grassroots efforts started.


--Gary


-- 
Gary Robinson
CEO
Transpose, LLC
grobinson@transpose.com
207-942-3463
http://www.emergentmusic.com
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454





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