Re: Email Web of Trust - Problem Statement

At 02:18 PM 3/8/2004, Alan DeKok wrote:
>Mark Baugher <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >   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.
>
>   Nope.  Spam is whatever a domain decides is spam.

I could be missing something here, but "web of trust" to me means that a 
collection of principals have decided to trust each other to some degree 
for some specific access or authorization to some resource.  So I don't 
understand your response.  One principal that speaks for a particular 
domain might have its own definition, but where does the web come into play?


> >  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 metrics make it more complicated.  The simple question is:
>
>   - If the message was passed from person to person, rather than being
>     delivered directly, what are the odds it would be marked along the
>     way to be spam?

I think I'm missing something.  Is the "web" the chain of persons 
(relays?), specifically, or is it more general, such as a web of mail 
operators that trust each others authorization decisions?

Mark


>   It's not quite trust, but it's a start.
>
> > 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.
>
>   OK.  And how do you measure this?  How do you enforce it?  It's very
>problematic.
>
>   Alan DeKok.