Re: Getting spam though again :-(
On Mar 28, 2004, at 1:32 AM, Brett Furlong wrote:
Got spam though debian security list again...
[...]
is there a way, we can have a human filter all the eMails before they
are allowed to be sent to all of us?
When I first read that, it sounded ridiculous, but after a while I
thought "Hey, that might actually be possible!"
Of course, this isn't really on topic to the list, so any replies to
this message should probably be made to me. If you (any of you out
there) have something to say, you can indicate that you'd like your
message forwarded to other interested parties (i.e. the other
respondents), or that you are not an interested party and wouldn't like
any such messages forwarded to you.
I'll go into a little detail about the idea I had, but keep in mind
it's only been formulating for the amount of time it takes me to eat a
bowl of ice cream.
The seed of my idea was probably the phrasing of your question,
specifically "a human" and "all of us". The phrase "a human" indicates
two things: you only need one, and any one will do. The phrase "all of
us" indicates the message being sent to every member (all) of a group
(us). The members of the group have different needs. Some want their
Debian-Security mails as soon as they can get them, spam or no spam.
Many probably don't check their email every 2 seconds of every hour of
the day. The other thing to remember about this group is that it is (I
assume) a rather large group.
So this group of subscribers can basically be divided into two tiers.
The first tier wants things about how they are. The second tier really
can't be bothered with spam, and can wait a bit longer if it means
getting less spam.
Here's the cool part: if the first tier is large enough, then one of
them is looking at a Debian-Security mail very soon after it has been
sent. So now we have a human reading the mail. That human can say "oh
good, that's not spam" and then the mail can be sent off to "all of us"
in the second tier.
That's the basic idea. The technical aspects are the hard part, but I
wouldn't be surprised if the community could figure it out. (Please
don't point out that in the current system the mails are sent out to
everybody at once (I think) and so by the time the first human sees it
it's already in almost everybody's inbox; I'm aware of that and still
think with a little effort we can pull something like this off for the
second tier) If some people volunteer to provide some resources
(whether a server or code or just good ideas) and some people volunteer
to be guinea pigs, at the worst we should have a very interesting
experiment!
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