Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 8:02 PM
While removing the few spam emails that Mail didn’t catch this evening, I had the idea of combining the Akismet comment spam filter API with Mail (or any email client, for that matter). Akismet does such a great job of catching comment spam, I thought that using a continually updated database of email spam could perhaps do the same for my inbox.
However, this idea is not without email privacy concerns. Every email would have to be sent to the Akismet servers, where they are checked and flagged as “spam” or “not spam,” much like the current blog plugins work. While I don’t believe the Akismet spam database is able to be publicly browsed, the text of every email received would have to be sent to and scanned by a third party system, and I’m sure some will object to this (heck, some people don’t even like the idea of Google’s bots placing targeted ads in Gmail).
I’m sure plugins for Mail and Thunderbird could be created in short order, but I’m not positive that their spam database would be accurate until a bunch of people started using it and flagging spam emails. As Mail’s spam filtering abilities only seem to increase with each release of Mac OS X, I think it’s about time to take matters into our own distributed hands.
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well if one could decide which email to send to such a server, i would for sure use it ! could be an option in mail/services menu maybe. “report to server as junk” !!?!
i was happy reading that post cause last couple weeks i ve been getting a new kind of junk mail that “mail” does NOT filter.
in that way users would willingly submit only those emails that are junk, and for the paranoids no one would be potentionaly able to read their personal emails.
a certain number of the same “type” emails would have to be received and analyzed by the server coming from a large enough community of “reporters” to validate that the mail is indeed junk, in part to avoid competitors to “mark as junk” emails their comptetitors send to their legitimate “email subscribers”.
just a thought.
When i used to use outlook on the pc there was a great program i used called Cloudmark, which allowed similar functionality. I used to pay a monthly fee for it but it was well worth it as i used to receive an ungodly amout of garbage on my email account, seeing i’ve had it for 10 years. now on the mac i was looking to find something similar, i hope this comes to fruition because although the mail client’s spam filters are good, they usually pick up any email sent to a number of people in the to or cc fields as spam, and that’s a little annoying.
I’d be interested to try it out. Akismet for WordPress has been incredibly effective for me and I don’t have a problem with a computer somewhere scanning my email. How many machines does your plain text email pass through on the way to you, anyway?
If you haven’t, try JunkMatcher. I’ve been using it with Mail for months and apart from the odd thing that slips through it’s the best that I’ve used.