On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:34:53 +0800, Shelby Moore <coolpage@earthlink.net> said: > Lastly I have done the full background search at ASRG (IRTF), and I did not > find prior art for either the proposal I made to legitimize bulk email by > moving it to "pull", nor the prior art for our soon to be patent-pending > anti-spam algorithm. ---- Q: Okay, what's the idea? A: Add something RSS-like to email clients, where the client occasionally (and infrequently) polls "subscribed" sites for new content and drops any new content into the normal mail stream (so that you could filter it into folders). For example, suppose I want to subscribe to the Floss Recycling newsletter. The Floss Recycling Web site gives instructions on the subscription address and when the newsletter comes out (e.g. "Mondays at 3 PM PST). I set up my email client to poll every Monday at 4 AM and to drop the newsletter into my FlossRecycling folder. ---- (From the previously cited posting to ASRG by Kaitlin Sherwood). The only difference I can see from what she proposes and what you propose is that she says "something RSS-like" and you said "POP". Elsewhere in the same posting, she points out it doesn't need to be RSS: ---- Q: Is RSS your clear and obvious choice for this? A: Absolutely not. My "expertise" in RSS is the product of only a few hours wandering around the Web looking at various Web sites. I feel like RSS is off in this parallel universe that I really don't know anything about. In particular, it was not obvious to me how the RSS client would figure out what was new since last checked and what was not. ---- OK.. So *maybe* you get partial credit for the idea that UIDL can be used to provide a capability that RSS didn't provide. ---- Q: So how on earth would this reduce spam? A: One of the biggest problems that content analyzers (e.g. SpamAssassin, spambayes) have is that legitimate commercial newsletters can look an awful lot like spam. If we can reroute all of the legit mass mailers to this RSS-esque scheme, then the content analyzers can be much more aggressive. ---- So she's even got the "If we move it all to this new scheme, we can attack anything left as spam" aspect. She even points out a few things you haven't mentioned (such as the "proof of delivery" aspect of a "pull" system). So other than "you can use UIDL", what *really new* concepts are in *your* proposal?
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