That was the Trustic model, and its founder, Mark Fletcher, shut down the service after less than a year declaring the experiment a failure:
"We regret to inform you that we are no longer taking registrations and will soon be closing the service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system." In a later e-mail, Mark explained: "The reason we pulled Trustic was because the underlying data submitted by the users was too unreliable. People are lazy (not a cut-down, just a fact). People will gladly forward messages they consider spam, but they won't stop and make sure they are really spam. And they won't consider if the messages originated from a large ISP that has a generally good record at spam prevention. This will always result in listings of ISPs that should not be listed, unless you come up with arbitrary thresholds and internal whitelists. The goal of Trustic was to not be arbitrary, for everything to be based on user recommendations. That's why we couldn't do that. Also, people will not submit positive recommendations in any proportion to the negative recommendations they'll submit, even if it's easy to do." I think Mark was right. If you make it too easy for people to report spam by automating the reporting process, you will end up with a database that is virtually worthless due to the lack of personal involvement in the validation and verification process, and like Mark said, "an inaccurate system is worse than no system." Bill ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Schmidt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 6:49 PM Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] SpamCop news > > May be a commercial enterprise will be more open to adding a "hands-off" > reporting system. Manually confirming every spam that I already determined > as spam makes the system not practical. > > What they need is a commercial (for fee) account which includes the > (revocable) right to submit directly into their system. > > Best Regards > Andy Schmidt > > Phone: +1 201 934-3414 x20 (Business) > Fax: +1 201 934-9206 > > --- > [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] > > --- > This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To > unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and > type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found > at http://www.mail-archive.com. > --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
