I don't get it. Can anyone explain to me what the reputations of recipients are? Or how this works? I understand that it doesn't simply scan emails for signs of spam. But that's about it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Monday, December 03, 2007
New spam-blocking technology?
There's an article in today's NYT about a new technology developed by Steven Kirsch (who founded Infoseek) to block spam. According to Kirsch the technology will be much more effective than current spam blockers, though its effectiveness depends on the number of people who use it. Below I've pasted how the article says it works.
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It looks like they need a critical mass of users because they filter the spam by comparing the differing probabilities each user has of receiving spam. If recipients of a certain email have high probabilities, the probability the message is spam increases....this is pretty curious, I'm not sure how this works though in terms of the spam/non-spam inflection point...but here's how the co. explains it:
"The concept of receiver reputation is based on the fact that different people receive different amounts of spam and legitimate email. When analyzing a message, each receiver’s percentage of spam versus legitimate email (his or her reputation) is an estimate of whether the message is spam or legitimate. Essentially, if the message is sent to users who typically receive a high percentage of spam, the message is more likely to be spam. However, if the message is sent to users who typically receive a low percentage of spam, the message is more likely to be legitimate. Aggregating the reputations of all recipients of a particular message, therefore, is equivalent to combining those users’ rating power to estimate the legitimacy of the sender and the message. In a receiver reputation system, the key determinant of whether a message is spam or legitimate is not the identity of the sender or the content of the email, but the reputations of the email recipients, individually and collectively."
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