[UFO Chicago] Re: spam filters

[Carey Tyler Schug]

Great, I want an FFB (filters that fight back) spam filter, but I'd want 
one with a WHITELIST and a blacklist.  The whitelist is common sites 
from emails that are not spam, like joke sites, etc.  The whitelist and 
blacklist are maintained externally, I can configure to use them or 
not.  The whitelist are sites manually determined to not be spammers, 
the blacklist are ones manually determined to be spammers.  The 
subscription to these lists might cost money.

I also want a local (personal) overriding whitelist and not-whitelist.  
I don't need a personal blacklist, that is taken care of by my baysian 
filter. But, anyway, if classmates.com or Yahoo groups is put in the 
white list, I can override it and attack them too, or allow them through 
even if blacklisted by the service.

The blacklisted sites and those my baysian filter said were spam would 
get retrieved "n" times, the ones not white listed would get retrieved 
once, the white listed sites would not be retrieved.  Or optionally the 
white-listed (pink-listed?) web pages could be retrieved and put in the 
e-mail to save me the task, or because they might change before I got to 
the e-mail, like newspaper stories that are free only for the first 24 
hours.  Probably any e-mail addresses (the real email address, not the 
faked one) from blacklisted sites would get "n" large e-mails back from 
me too, telling them to take me off their list.

aside: I never could understand why newspapers allowed a story to be 
free for 24 hours, but then charged.  I would think the first 24 hours 
is when it is most valuable, and if one wanted to make it free only some 
of the time, I would make free from 2-7 days or something like that.

 From FFB on the Paul Graham site:

We would want to ensure that this is only done to suspected spams. As a 
rule, any url sent to millions of people is likely to be a spam url, so 
submitting every http request in every email would work fine nearly all 
the time. But there are a few cases where this isn't true: the urls at 
the bottom of mails sent from free email services like Yahoo Mail and 
Hotmail, for example.

To protect such sites, and to prevent abuse, auto-retrieval should be 
combined with blacklists of spamvertised sites. Only sites on a 
blacklist would get crawled, and sites would be blacklisted only after 
being inspected by humans. The lifetime of a spam must be several hours 
at least, so it should be easy to update such a list in time to 
interfere with a spam promoting a new site. [2]

Brian Sobolak wrote:

>Hello -
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>2.  Here's the guy whose book I mentioned a few times.  Most of the essays
>are online and are worth reading:  http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
>
>  
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