Better Spam Sorting?

from the prioritization-is-key dept

Jeremy Wagstaff has written about a new kind of anti-spam system that judges the likelihood of spam on the "reliability of the sender." That is, they look at who sent the email and look at factors like how long the domain has been around, the relationship between the server and the domain and other aspects to determine the likelihood of spam. Of course, with most spam coming from spoofed email addresses information about the domain may not be all that useful -- but I would guess that's why they look at the relationship between the server and the domain. Whether or not it works, there is another, more interesting, concept brought up by this service. One of the things they do is hold back any suspicious emails, but once a day will send an email listing all of the held emails, color coding the held messages and grouping similar addresses together. Most (though, not all) anti-spam systems tend to simply lump all spam into a spam folder in the order received. One area that many people have suggested needs improvement is email inbox management. So, I'm wondering if, rather than just as an anti-spam system, this type of technology may find its way into the inbox for better prioritizing legitimate emails. A few companies have tried email prioritization systems, and they usually fail -- either because they don't work very well or because people are simply used to their own manual systems for email prioritization, and it's not easy to get people to change. So, it may be interesting to see if a technology that figures out a better way to prioritize spam could eventually cross over to prioritizing legitimate emails as well.