Re: ASRG/Filtering List Launch: "Let the games begin!"

Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
> 1. A standard header to be produced by the filters that can be used by 
> the end-user's MUA. Having a standard header may reduce the complexity 
> that the user needs to go through when configuring his MUA to parse 
> filtering results.

A good starting point might be to review the headers that current 
implementations are inserting to understand the intent of each header 
and how it is used.   POPFile adds two headers to each message:

X-Text-Classification: <class>

This is the type of the message as determined by the text classifier, 
the class is user defined, but in a typical 2 class usage the user would 
specify something like spam and inbox as classes.  (POPFile supports 
arbitrary numbers of classes hence there's no specific mention of spam 
in the program).

X-POPFile-Link: <url>

This is a URL to the specific message as viewed in the POPFile user 
interface.  This is done so that a user can go from their mail client 
directly to the same message in the POPFile UI to change its classification.

Note that POPFile strips these headers from _incoming_ messages so that 
they cannot be forged, and it notes the presence of these headers on 
incoming messages as a token.

> 2. Ways for filters to share information dynamically including possible 
> standards for formats and protocols. This may encompass dynamic updates 
> like anti-virus programs do, dynamic sharing of filtering data in 
> real-time, collaborative filtering etc.

There's a lot of this going on with checksum updates.  Are any of the 
checksum/hash systems on this list?

John.