On Monday, January 17, 2011, 10:52:58 PM, Warren Jr. wrote: > Hi folks, > Here is an opportunity for non-developers to do simple tasks to help > improve Spamassassin.
> I am seeking volunteers to help me build and administrate a "ham trap". > The idea is to subscribe a list of unique e-mail addresses to various > retailers, airlines, government and other legitimate bulk mail senders. > A sufficient variety of ham trap subscriptions should increase the > variety of legitimate senders represented in nightly masscheck and thus > improve the safety of Spamassassin's rules. > Benefits of the Ham Trap > ======================== > * Creation of an automated, synthetic source to build a corpus of very > recent ham for the nightly masscheck. Ham trap data will be expired > from the masscheck after 3 months. This will be fairly easy to maintain > in a 99% automated fashion, ensuring a constant stream of fresh data for > the nightly masscheck largely without the need for human sorting. > * Help to identify legitimate bulk senders who are performing poorly > with spamassassin. Our data may help legitimate senders to modify their > mail practices to avoid spamminess. > * Each subscription is a unique tracked address. This will make it > possible to definitively identify bulk senders who violate their > customer's privacy by selling their e-mail address list to others. > There isn't much we can do about these cases other than shame them on a > web page, but for spam fighters this is useful information. While I certainly would encourage improving ham and spam corpora, this proposal may open up a lot of grey areas that may be non-trivial to resolve. Some of the legitimate mailing lists that sell, share or rent their addresses to third party senders may be doing so legally if it's permitted in the terms of use one agrees to when signing up. Obviously such a practice is questionable at best in terms of ethics, but it may be technically legal. There are also "affiliate marketing programs" explicitly based on sharing "opt in" lists which may be even less ethical and apparently have many abusers. Such things may be legal while being unethical. So a couple points: 1. Subscribing to lists opens up lots of grey areas including the above. 2. Some of the areas are very difficult to resolve into spam or ham. Some more aggressive anti-spammers may say all of the above is spam, but others may disagree, and the mail may be legal. Before anyone accuses me of being in favor of spammers, please be aware that I am personally highly against any of these unethical practices, but when essentially making decisions for others, one needs to be very careful and consider whether there may be legitimate, ethical, legal or even wanted uses of such things. One person's ham may be another persons spam, and vice versa. However, most people don't want the stuff bots send. The issue is complex, and there are many deliverability, security and anti-spam companies and organizations that struggle with these issues every day. Maintaining accurate ham and spam corpora and making policies for what belongs in which category is trivial in some easy cases like bot pill spam, but non-trivial in other cases. Cheers, Jeff C. -- Jeff Chan mailto:je...@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/
