ACM TechNews

Student Develops Anti-Spam Program

Stanford Daily (01/16/08) Sy, Andrea

Stanford University graduate student David Erickson and computer science professor Nick McKeown have developed Default Off Email (DOEmail), a free anti-spam tool that enables users to broadly categorize received mail. DOEmail divides mail into three basic groups--a list of people you want mail from, a list of people you do not want mail from, and an unknown group for all uncategorized addresses. Email received and classified as "unknown" generates an auto-response from DOEmail, which emails a form to the sender to verify that they are a person and not a spam machine. The sender is then given three weeks to respond. Erickson says DOEmail can help users regain control of their inboxes by allowing users to micromanage their spam control or to simply set broad filters and let the program do the rest. He says DOEmail is more effective and more user-friendly than other anti-spam tools such as those based on content filtering. Currently, the 35 users participating in the research project have not received any spam since using DOEmail, which has a plug-in for Mozilla Thunderbird and is accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2008/1/16/studentDevelopsAntispamProgram

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