Re: Email Web of Trust - Problem Statement

At 01:36 PM 3/8/2004, Alan DeKok wrote:
>Mark Baugher <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The question that pops into my head when reading the problem statement is
> > "trusted to do what or to not do what?"
>
>   The problem in question is spam, so the trust in question should be
>related to spam.
>
>   e.g. "I believe that 75% of the messages from domain FOO are spam".
>
>   Taken over multiple intermediary hops, these numbers give you some
>probability that any one message is a priori going to be spam.  It's
>not perfect, but it's a start.

Yes, but it begs the question of what is spam.  One needs a very clear 
definition of what is spam in order to trust that some domain does or does 
not originate spam.  And there could be more than one metric such as 
originating UBE promotions versus nefarious scams to bilk people out of 
their savings.

More generally, the trust could be based on a particular policy or set of 
policies:  A particular domain, for example, might be trusted to adhere to 
certain antispam policies regarding UBE, authenticating senders, responding 
to complaints, etc.

I think we need to resolve this question before discussing mechanisms.

Mark


>   Alan DeKok.