Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.Jeff Howe, Jun 2006
Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.
Looking to harness the power of your crowd? Find out about Chaordix™ - technology that enables enterprises to get the most out of crowdsourcing.
Ideas
Automated SPAM Email Blocker!
People
Ideas
Businesses
Connect with talented people.
Collaborate on ideas.
Realize your vision.
It's free! Like love in the sixties!
The Idea
Instead of trying to identify 'SPAM', this software would reside in your computer monitoring all incoming email to identify messages which 'are' valid. For inbound email where the author is not in your white list (authorized list of addresses to receive email from), the method to determine valid messages is a keyword located in either the subject line or the body of the message. This keyword could be a pattern of characters or a single letter in a specific location which is specified by the user (should allow multiple possible keywords). If the author is not found in the white list and the keyword is missing, the mail is considered invalid and a reply message is sent back informing the author how to send the email with the proper keyword, and then the message is deleted from the server. Since most spam is sent using automated methods, they could not automatically process the instructions in the reply to send the message, thus the user will never see spam from them.
I thought of this idea when I was...
One day while dealing with thousands of incoming spam emails from my multiple email accounts, I figured there had to be a better way. Not only was I tired of spam, but hated the fear that a legitimate email may get thrown in the trash and not seen. I figured it was better to try locating legitimate email and consider everything else spam until proven otherwise. Of course I did not want to block people out that it did not detect as valid, so I figured it was best to automatically send a reply message information the person how to contact me with the proper keywords just in case it was not spam and that if they did send a valid message with the proper keywords, it would automatically add them to my white list. Of course, I figure I would get some spam from those who wanted to do it by hand, but figure it is better to deal with maybe a dozen spam messages a month than thousands per day and at the same time rid myself of the fear I would miss valid emails.
Comments Posted
Post A Comment
Got something to say?
Log in to post a comment.