Fighting spam

[Anon]

Hi everyone,

just thought this might be a good place to kick around an idea I have and possibly get a ball or two rolling.

Essentially my idea is a webmail system much like Hotmail or perhaps some sort of POP mail filtering device. Every email that goes through the system has a basic check done on the sender address. If the system can determine the sender address definately does not exist then the email is regarded as spam and deleted before arriving in inbox's.

The second level of protection is derived from a little button that says "Spam" sitting next to the "Delete message" button. If say, three, people report an email as being spam then it is immediately removed from eveyone elses inbox.

That's it. Please share any ideas, suggestions or criticisms you have of this system.

[neville]

What if three freinds find the contents of the email interesting and don't want to share it with the rest of the ppl and treat it as spam ?

[Anon]

The best way to fight spam is to never give your real email to ANY online 'form'. MOST of the forms that require this usually resell your personel information for revenue. One wasy to tell if they are building a spam list is if the form you are filling out asks for the amount of money you make per year, or what 'interests' do you have. So the best way to fight spam is at the user level... with some extra teaching and training you, and your users can remain very spam free. Also good use of the realtime blackhole list is also helpfull, along with having a anti-spam web account.. such as softhome.net.

-Jon