Personally I favor the idea of digest notifications with the ability to retrieve and/or whitelist messages that might have been blocked. BTW, that idea is copyrighted by Matthew Bramble, all rights reserved, and I'd patent it also if I wanted to be a complete jerk :)
Matt
Andy Schmidt wrote:
Patent Number?
Many patents exists and seem to be broad. But often, upon close examination, the claims may be much narrower) than the casual reader appreciates. Also, one has to look at the patent file wrapper to determine the outcome of prior art searches to see if subsequent communication with the examiner may have further narrowed the scope.
Best Regards Andy Schmidt
H&M Systems Software, Inc. 600 East Crescent Avenue, Suite 203 Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458-1846
Phone: +1 201 934-3414 x20 (Business) Fax: +1 201 934-9206
http://www.HM-Software.com/
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of R. Scott Perry Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 03:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Spam Lion Functionality
Sorry - I really don't see why this is not a highly desirable feature and how this would create "spam" that the "WARN" or "BOUNCE" action don't generate already!?
It doesn't create more spam than BOUNCE -- it creates the exact same amount. But that's the problem. Instead of 1,000 E-mails to you being blocked as spam, if the spammer chooses my E-mail address to use as the return address, you'll now get 0 spams -- but I'll get 1,000. Less annoying spams, yes, but spam nonetheless. And actually harder to deal with, since they come from your server (so they are much less likely to get caught), and I have to verify that the bounce messages aren't for E-mails I sent.
Yes, if you set it up well -- not requiring verifications for E-mails that have a low weight (probably legit; mail that wouldn't otherwise be blocked) and not requiring them for E-mails with a high weight (almost certainly spam) -- it could be useful, with minimal collateral damage. But even so, there's the problem with mailing lists, and the temptation to block a bit more spam by requiring confirmations on lower weights (for example, if someone asks me for free advice, they are likely to get it -- but not if they block my mail or require a confirmation, since just about everything under our control is set up perfectly from an anti-spam perspective, and responding to confirmations is a nuisance, and may not even work). Then, there's the spammers (aka SpamArrest) that harvest confirmations addresses and sell them to spammers, and the spammers that send pretend confirmations to get people to their websites -- these make it less likely legit people will confirm.
But, the ultimate challenge is the patent. That means that it would require either [1] paying royalties to the guy that bought the patent, or [2] challenging the patent. We haven't yet found enough benefit from such a test to warrant estimating those costs, given that they are likely to be much higher than for any other spam test we've added.
-Scott
--- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)]
--- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
