spam pooling

[Zack Brown]

Hi,

I know there are some folks on the net who save up their spam and make
it available, but is any attempt being made to create a pool that
everyone can contribute to? I certainly am building up a large corpus
that I'd like to share. It would be great to set my mail client up so
that a single keypress would send the current message (or all tagged
messages or whatever) to the central repository, where it would be
sorted, duplicates removed, and perhaps eyeballed by volunteers before
passing into the public archive.

Eyeballing could be as simple as this procedure: if an email has never
been reported before, the system bounces it automatically to some number
of people in the volunteer pool. End of story. If the system receives
another copy of the email, either from them or someone else, it will
say, "ok, two random people agree on this, it must be spam," and add it
to the archive. If two is too small a number, the bar could be set
higher.

The identities of the volunteers, as well as the identity of the person
who originally sent in the sample, would be remembered. Then whenever
someone reported, "hey, this piece isn't spam at all!" that could be
counted against those people, and used to weed out spammers trying to
degrade the system. I know there are people who would enjoy (well, maybe
that's not the right word) looking over the entire corpus, and reporting
on false positives.

Be well,
Zack

-- 
Zack Brown