82% of email is spam

82% of email is spam

My 2 bits. Most of the spam I get is very repetitious in form, disregarding the list of bogus words used to bypass filters. I suspect a little human intervention added to filters can get rid of most spam, and doing it at the ISP level can reduce the impact on the net. Here's how it might work:

1) I get spam in my mailbox.
2) I forward the spam to a "spam alert" service that verifies it as spam and then extracts the meat from the spam (the human intervention part), then feeds the meat to a pattern builder.
3) The pattern is forwarded to all ISPs to be used in their spam filters. The filter would reject any email that contained text that fit the pattern within some reasonably high confidence level. The rejected email would be returned to the sender, hopefully by the sender's own ISP. Rejecting spam at the network edge would be a huge win.
4) In the case of a false positive, the sender would have to sufficiently restate the email's text. This could be a pain, but I doubt it would happen all that often, percentage-wise.
5) The spammer is also forced to sufficiently restate his spam.

So what do we gain? The spammer has to work a lot harder (harder than adding some bogus word strings, anyway). With adequate speed of response from spam recipients, many of the spammer's targets would never see his spam. And the pattern building is largely centralized and so can be more easily improved as we become more clever. Additionally, catching spam at the network edge allows easier identification of the spam source.

The monetary cost is primarily in the "spam alert" service. I suspect that cost will be very low compared to the size of the spam problem. The social cost (or effort) will include getting most of the ISPs to use the pattern filtering, but I suspect seeing success at a few ISPs will provide a lot of momentum. I for one am certainly willing to badger my ISP to use it.

There will be no silver bullet. As we all know, there are always antisocials with too much time and misdirected energy. The best we can do is to keep far enough ahead of them to keep their damage to a tolerable level. I think that will be good enough, if we can do it.