Anti spam idea
Some time ago Sergio
his requirements for the perfect anti-spam system. One of them was
this:
Zero false positives - Losing one
valid message is always worse than one spam message passing
through. Several orders of magnitude worse. It’s possibly
catastrophic. It is a risk that can’t be taken. It must be
matematically provable that the system won’t reject a valid
message.
As I pointed
this requirement is the major fault of AI based spam filtering. A
single false positive could destroy a good spam filter completely
(see
article for a recent example).
All this to say that I had a crazy idea. Maybe it has already
been discussed and probably has lots of problems I haven’t thought
about. But here it goes:
Why not have the anti-spam filter reply to the message sender
with a message explainig that his message has been filtered and
requesting that he resends the message to a specific, one time
only, e-mail address? Spammers would get all their e-mail back and
someone trying to contact you would have a way of sending you an
e-mail even if it gets filtered.
An example:
- jonh_doe@example.com sends an e-mail to
joane.doe@example.com - For some reason Joane’s e-mail reader rejects the e-mail as
spam and sends a reply to John telling him to resend the message to
joanne.doe-617131243@example.com - John does has told and the message his delivered
- The generated e-mail address is deleted
This solution combines the best of spam filters and systems
requiring the user to prove he is human (like
Arrest). Could this work?
