Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: MsgTo.Com
Author: Eric Soroos Posted: 8/6/1999; 10:57:40 AM Topic: MsgTo.Com Msg #: 9219 (In response to 9211) Prev/Next: 9218 / 9220
They're not doing anything that wasn't done 5 years ago with procmail and interesting reply rules. Except for building a database of people and their hobbies and advertising...In their battle against spam, they are using one of the classic methods (with "patent pending") to annoy the people you communicate with. Just watch. I bet that there will be a DOS attack against them where all the public msgto email addresses are collected and spammed using the return address of some poor unfortunate person.
BTW, for those of you keeping score at home, there are at least 5 classic anti-spam techniques:
1) public/private mail addresses
2) Munged addresses when in public
3) Spam heuristics
4) Whitelist known correspondents
5) Blacklist known spammersWhat msgto is doing is an automated method of #4 where the sender does the work in proving that they are not spam.
Their buddy list is just a whitelist with a different name. (Oh yeah, their system is implementable with my mailserver in ... well, the pieces are there but not all tied together. Give me a day.)
eric
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