Habeas returns

Remember Habeas? This is the company which copyrighted a bit of haiku, then restricted the right to include that "work of art" in the headers of an email message. Only non-spam messages could contain the poem without violating the license. The idea was that mail filters could look for the Habeas mark and, upon finding it, deliver the mail with confidence that it was legitimate.

The folks at Habeas were, apparently, surprised to discover that spammers are not as respectful as one might like of copyright law - or much of anything else. It did not take them all that long to start including the Habeas headers in their solicitations, especially once they figured out that filters like SpamAssassin gave a strong bonus to such messages. Rather than being a guarantee of legitimacy, the Habeas headers quickly became one of the most reliable indicators of spam. The SpamAssassin bonus came out, and Habeas disappeared from view.

The company is still there, however, and they have not given up. A new press release issued by the company celebrates the fact that SpamAssassin 3.0 once again gives a bonus to Habeas-marked mail. There is a new twist, however: Habeas now implements an online whitelist of senders whose mail is really thought to be legitimate. Strangely enough, getting onto the whitelist requires that a fee be paid to Habeas.

This new service might just work for certain kinds of commercial emailers, as long as Habeas sticks to its anti-spam standards. We may be seeing the beginning of a shift to a reputation-based mechanism for the filtering of email. Blacklists were clearly the first step in that direction, but they are limited in their scope. A scheme which can track positive reputations might, just, bring a finer degree of control to the spam filtering problem. Or it might just herald an era where purchasing yet another useless digital certificate will be required to get email delivered at all. Either way, it is a development worth watching.

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