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Using social-networking services to filter spam

Spam: filster: Linking reputations networks to email whitelists. Very interesting — a tool to use the social network data from Orkut, FOAFweb, Reputation Research Network, and CPAN to whitelist email senders in SpamAssassin. Only problems I can see:

  • needs an anti-forging mechanism like SPF to avoid spammers forging their way through your whitelist — but the author does cover that.
  • some of the site terms of service may prohibit scraping — Orkut’s, for example, is very strict.

Still, a very nifty idea, and one worth more investigation… the combination of FOAF and SPF in particular, given that tribe.net (if I recall correctly?) will be generating FOAF data, is quite cool.