Social Networks Fight SPAM

An interesting study has been released that discusses the potential use of social networks as a SPAM fighting agent. The proposed solution can be readily assembled with existing technologies and leverages some basic features of most modern mail servers, including whitelists and blacklists.

As noted in the original article:

The e-mail clusters can be mapped out by inspecting the ‘from’, ‘to’ and ‘cc’ fields in a user’s inbox. An automated system can quickly build up a blacklist of spammers, as well as a ‘whitelist’ of approved sources.

Boykin and Roychowdhury found that by quantifying the clustering of incoming e-mails, they could eliminate about 54% of spam. E-mails above a certain ‘clustering threshold’ are always friendly, and those below a lower threshold are always spam. Messages that fall between these two clustering thresholds are ‘don’t knows’ - the system can’t be sure how to classify them. Typically, say the researchers, this applies to about 50% of the mail received.

The remaining half of the e-mail then has to be filtered in a more sophisticated way. But by then the scale of the problem has been cut in half.

Source: Nature via Many 2 Many

This study provides some statistical backup, however, I'm more curious why it was never reported on earlier. For some time, systems like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo! have offered differing levels of security for your Inbox from Spam Filtering to White Lists. Seems that any of these providers could have not only provided similar statistics but also would have had a very broad sample to work with.

Additionally, while 50% isn't bad, that still leaves a lot to desire. Naturally, some form of Bayesian or other natural filtering would be applied to the remaining 50% to handle that other annoying statistic.

The actual study can be found here.