Re: An e-mail web of trust

Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> On 2004-02-28 21:15:41 -0500, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
> 
>>This kind of like the "chain of trust" used in PGP. Sounds like an
>>interesting idea to me! What would spammers do in theory to get around
>>such system?
> 
> I wrote up some ideas about an email web of trust some time ago. I
> intended to expand on it a bit (especially on the trust metric) before
> publishing it but it seems that now is a good time to throw it into the
> discussion:
> 
> (HTML version at http://www.hjp.at/projekte/mail-wot/outline.rxml)

I took a look at it. The scaling and privacy issues might be the biggest 
problem. What I was thinking is a web of trust on domain level, not 
sender level. That might make those issues a little less problematic 
since there is less systems to deal with and there is no record of which 
users exchange email with which users.

However, the biggest problem in a web of trust system is scaling - there 
is way too much data. Its the same problem with reputation systems. A 
domain might want to include as many possible trustee domains as 
possible in case one of them shuts down or goes bad. The same with 
reputation systems - a domain might want to use multiple reputation 
services, although business-wise there will probably be only a few left.

The real question is would such system be really scalable? I don't know 
if we can easily answer such question.

Yakov