170735 - Spam Killer - by Question.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Ian]

There are a lot of Idea's on ways to block spam from your inbox. I would like to
share an idea that I have.

I was thinking of trying to block spam by posting questions to the potential
newcomers to your address book. So anytime you get email from an unknown source,
a question would be fired back to the sender. If they can answer the question
then most likely they had to put some though into the answer and most likely are
not a spammer.

I was thinking that there could be a new preference box for setting up this
functionality. It would have the following options.

(X) Block Spam by Questioning the Sender.
    [Setup Questions. (Button)]

When the user clicks on “setup questions” they would be prompted for some
question and answers. There could be some predefined questions and some made up
questions.

 Predefined Questions
   What city do I live in?       
   How old am I.
   .... (And so on)

For the answers to these questions, the system could support a comma-separated
list. So that if I had asked how old am I and I knew that some of my friends did
not know exactly how old I was I could accept multiple answers.

Then, of course, the user could create their own questions.

The next issue is how do they reply to a question that was sent to them and how
does the mail client know an answer when they get one.

For this I was thinking of something similar to the mail-form method that was
used by network solutions. So the email could be in for format:
_____________________________________________________________________

Subject: Please verify your identity?

Due to the fact that I receive way too much junk mail on a daily basis, I
require that you answer one simple question so the I can verify that you know me
and you are not some spammer. Once you have answered this question, you should
not have any problem sending me mail in the future.

When replying to this question simply hit reply from your mail program and place
your answer below. To the left of “Answer:”
Do not remove the line containing question id.

Here is my question

Question ID: 123123-7812-3712

How old am I?

Answer:

_______________________________________________________________________-

When the mail system retrieves the second email from that user, it could scan
the mail for a question id so that it can cross reference a database for
questions that were sent out.
If answer to the question is correct then the user is added to the address book
and all mail from the spam folder (from that email address) is moved to the inbox.

Anyway, I think you get the idea. I'm sure you can expand from this.

I'm not sure if this type of system would be good to be implemented in the
business world but I think it could work pretty good for the personal users.

Comment 1

[Henrik Gemal]

I think this is beyond mozilla...