
Paul Graham provides answer to spam emails (2002) - tosh
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business-paul-graham-provides-stunning-answer-to-spam-e-mails.html
======
apo
Spam countermeasures have led to some fascinating new technologies. In
addition to the one cited in the article was Hashcash, which was developed a
few years earlier:

[http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf](http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf)

Hashcash requires the sender to expend a small quantity of computational work,
and attach a proof of this to the email before a recipient even opens it. The
underlying assumption is that the burden would be insignificant for a real
email sender, but onerous for a spammer.

The approach inspired the powerful anti-spam system at the center of Bitcoin.

It might be interesting to catalog all of the most innovative early approaches
to combating spam, and the unrelated technologies that later arose from them.

~~~
wereHamster
I recently came across this idea to prevent friend request spam on social
media, using the Lightning network. The idea is that the person sending you
the friend request must attach a small amount of money (in the form of a
special lightning payment). If the friend request is legitimate, you can
accept it (and not claim the money). But if it's spam you reject the friend
request but take the money instead. This is different than Hashcash in that it
incurs real monetary costs to the attacker. Instead of using compute resources
(for the mining algorithm), the money would actually end up in your pocket.

~~~
Retric
A much older example is the high cost of sending text messages basically
eliminates text message spam.

~~~
oarsinsync
Except the cost of phone calls, text messages and even postal mail is
sufficiently low to result in spam across all three mediums in ever larger
quantities than before

~~~
chrismeller
As he said, it is a much older version. As with everything the cost decreases
over time to the point that it no longer outweighs benefit.

Put another way, this is the unfortunate flip side of free unlimited talk and
text.

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lifthrasiir
I think this article doesn't provide much value over the original essay [1].
And of course, all excitement from the article is now highly obsoleted.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)

~~~
rouvax
The article has the merit of significantly reducing the size of the original
essay, while IMO still retaining two strong messages: 1\. The original (is
it?) method used to prevent spam, and 2\. The 'seed' factor, which is expected
to make spammers work harder. At mid-page I was thinking "meh, spammers will
just have to improve their writing then", but this may not be sufficient
thanks to the user-specific seed.

[edit: I didn't realize the original article was from 2002. I agree the
article is a bit obsolete at that point.]

~~~
toxik
Modern-day spam is typically generative, and modelling the distribution of
"natural e-mail messages" is sadly too naive today. Human beings also
understand text through vision, not through bits -- so 1oca1host is just me
corrupting the word localhost, but making that inference requires a visual
understanding of words. That also gave rise to what is probably a more common
spam variant today: the text-embedded-as-an-image type. I've long been of the
impression that the only proper way to do text analysis is by vision, a more
end-to-end solution as it were.

~~~
rouvax
You may very well be true, but then it's a pity that a 2019 article on a 2002
method didn't mention it?

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nailer
Wait did Paul Graham inspire SpamAssassin (the original 'big deal' Bayesian
spam filter)?

Cool circa-2002 game for Unix nerds: you have 60 seconds to telnet to port 25
and generate the highest spamassassin score.

~~~
varjag
SpamAssassin predates the article. Not sure it had Bayesian filtering from the
start tho.

Paul Graham however definitely championed and popularized the idea of Bayesian
filtering.

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gist
Meanwhile the spam filter at gmail (business account) regularly marks email
messages that I send from our own systems (say showing disk space) to our own
accounts (and nowhere else) as spam. Also sales lead forms. So they come in
and we say 'not spam' and the filter is not smart enough to understand the
next very similar email is also not a spam. A human could quite easily see by
just the format and the layout (in addition to numerous times marking 'not
spam') that it was the not spam.

~~~
meijer
Yeah, I also noticed this.

And I'm pretty sure that some years ago gmail was much better at this.

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danesparza
This article is 17 years old ... I must be missing something. Why is it
relevant right now?

~~~
jwilk
HN has an obsession about Paul Graham.

~~~
QuercusMax
I mean, this is literally Paul Graham's site.

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joefarish
I use the word "unsubscribe" to filter out a lot of emails. There are
occasional false positives but after combining the above filter with a
whitelist of senders it has proven to be very effective.

~~~
pornel
That's why it's now "if you don't wish to receive these emails, click here".

~~~
notamerican
Then, as mentioned in the article, the you could filter on the word "click"
too.

~~~
ufmace
The whole point of these Bayesian filters is that you don't have to spend
mental cycles thinking of clever words to filter on. Just mark 'em spam and
not spam, the algorithms are plenty good at finding which words are spammy or
legitimate without human help.

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mhd
If only we would've reached and saved Usenet in time. A lot of the current web
is a bad proprietary replacement of it.

~~~
randcraw
Yeah. I suspect a few bayes-based techniques could have auto-moderated most
noise out of most Usenet groups pretty effectively.

But can AI stop politicians like Cuomo from censoring unpalatable speech
(Usenet/Reddit/Voat) to death?

