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Re: subjects, was: proposal for built-in spam burden & email privacy protection

2004-02-13 07:33:23
On Fri February 13 2004 05:12, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

It would be great if we could come up with a way to make sure the
subject better reflects the content of a message, both to avoid this
type of spamming and also for regular email, especially in cases
where a mailinglist discussion strays but the subject remains the
same.

An obvious first step here would be to require that the words in the
subject line are also present in the body of the message.

Watch out for that first step, it's a doozy!

1)  This will be trivially violated by typoes.

2) Some people treat the subject as part of the message.  They feel free 
to use nouns there as antecedents for pronouns in the body.  This may 
be short enough that the actual noun never needs to be mentioned again.  
Alternately, a different noun may be used.

3) Some people send messages with NO subject!  (Yes, even if it's not 
spam.)

4) Some people send messages with no BODY!  After all, brevity is the 
soul of wit.

And on that note, I better shut up now....  B-)

-- 
Dave Aronson, Senior Software Engineer, Secure Software Inc.
Email me at: work (D0T) 2004 (@T) dja (D0T) mailme (D0T) org
(Opinions above NOT those of securesw.com unless so stated!)
WE'RE HIRING developers, auditors, and VP of Prof. Services.




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