Subject: [Asrg] Content based filtering

From: "Damien Morton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:30:58 -0500

I have a basic problem with any approaches that mandate being able to
read the contents of an email in order to classify it as spam or not.
Whilst the current mail infrastructure makes it easy for servers to read
the contents of mail, this neednt necessarily always be so. These
systems can also be avoided by various transformations, such as
slice-and-dice tables, misspellings, etc etc. Further, any content
oriented detection systems could easily be repurposed for privacy
invasion purposes.

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: "Chris Lewis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:49:30 -0500

> oriented detection systems could easily be repurposed for privacy

A mail server can be easily repurposed for privacy invasion ... just a 
few source code hacks and voila, all of everyone's email.  It's not a 
very good argument.  That's for privacy legislation to deal with, and 
not a reason why content filters (or filters that work with other 
criteria than "content") cannot be used when appropriate consent is 
obtained.

---

From: "Damien Morton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:36:15 -0500

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On 
> 
> Damien Morton wrote:
> > Whilst the current mail infrastructure makes it easy for servers to 
> > read the contents of mail, this neednt necessarily always 
> be so. These 

Like I said, future mail systems might make reading of the content of an
email more difficult than it is now. This would destroy any anti-spam
infrastructure that relies on content reading.

I don't think its enough to rely on privacy legislation. As we have seen
with spam, anything that can be done cheaply and easily is highly
resistant to legislation. We should not be building systems that can be
cheaply and easily subverted into becoming vast distributed line-eaters.